Stability AI lost its VP of audio Ed Newton-Rex in November 2023 after he disagreed with the company’s views on ‘fair use’ and training materials. Since then there has been a change of CEO, and the current boss Prem Akkaraju has been holding out some olive branches to the creative industries in an interview with the Financial Times. While he did come out with some of the familiar talking points of fair use defences – AI’s learn from art like humans do, etc – he also talked about a positive project within his company. “I think that a marketplace for people to opt into and then upload their art, I think that’s going to happen,” he said.
“Actually, something we’re working on, where artists can actually 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 they get compensated for it. I think it’s really smart.” He later noted: “What the economics are going to be is one thing, but should they [creators] be compensated? Of course.” Note, when Stability AI launched a music model during Newton-Rex’s tenure, it was trained on fully-licensed production music.