A spokesperson for Stability.AI did not respond to a request for comment. In a tweet, Stability.AI’s founder Emad Mostaque said the company is not doing this for “ethical or legal reasons.”
“We are doing this as no reason to particularly not do it and be more inclusive,” Mostaque said on Twitter. “We think different model datasets will be interesting,” he added in another tweet.
But Karla Ortiz, an artist and a board member of the Concept Art Association, an advocacy organization for artists working in entertainment, says she doesn’t think Stability.AI is going far enough.
The fact that artists have to opt out means “that every single artist in the world is automatically opted in and our choice is taken away,” she says.
“The only thing that Stability.AI can do is algorithmic disgorgement, where they completely destroy their database and they completely destroy all models that have all of our data in it,” she says.