Stability AI stance on licensing

Photo Credit: Stability AI

Stability AI, the UK-based company behind the open source image generator Stable Diffusion, has signaled a notable change in its approach to artists’ rights.

Previously, the company relied on scraping internet images to train its algorithms—a method at the center of ongoing lawsuits regarding copyright. High-profile departures, including that of former executive Ed Newton-Rex, underscored growing tensions within the company, particularly regarding the firm’s refusal to compensate creators whose work was used in AI training.

Now the company’s newly appointed CEO, Prem Akkaraju, has recently called for a new direction. Akkaraju assumed leadership of Stability AI in June 2024, following a period marked by legal and financial troubles. His proposed system would be an opt-in system for creators alongside licensing and compensation. That’s perfectly handy after the company has already engaged in hoovering up most of the copyrighted content available on the internet.

“I think that a marketplace for people to opt into and then upload their art, I think that’s going to happen,” Akkaraju told the Financial Times in a recent interview. “Actually, that’s something we’re working on, where artists can have a marketplace or a portal where they can say ‘hey you could train on this’ and then that actually gets licensed and used by us and others and [the artists] get compensated for it. I think it’s really smart.”

Akkaraju says the economics of how to pay for that content hasn’t been ironed out yet, but he does believe that creators who submit their work to Stability AI in this manner should be compensated. This new direction represents a significant shift from what had become an industry norm for AI—deploying the so-called ‘free-to-use’ data harvested from the internet without direct permission from creators. Akkaraju’s stance is partly shaped by his background in film, where he previously led Wētā FX—which handled special effects for films including Avatar and The Lords of the Rings.

Stability AI is reportedly exploring models similar to those in the music industry, including Spotify and Shazam, to track and license content. “That’s part of what we’re working on. You can have this as a fingerprinting type of technology and I think that’s going to take a lot of opt-in from both sides.”

Akkaraju acknowledged concerns about past data harvesting practices, reiterating that the company datasets are now built from free-to-use sources and some bespoke licensing deals. He also emphasizes that Stability AI has built proactive safety features to prevent misuse—such as creating deepfakes of famous people or abusive content creation.