Artists will have the chance to opt out of the next version of one of the world’s most popular text-to-image AI generators, Stable Diffusion, the company behind it has announced.
Stability.AI will work with Spawning, an organization founded by artist couple Mat Dryhurst and Holly Hendon who have built a website called HaveIBeenTrained, that allows artists to search for their works in the data set that was used to train Stable Diffusion. Artists will be able to select which works they want to exclude from the training data.
The decision follows a heated public debate between artists and tech companies over how text-to-image AI models should be trained. Stable Diffusion is based on the open source LAION-5B data set, which is built by scraping the internet of images, including copyrighted works of artists. Some artists’ names and styles became popular prompts for wannabe AI-artists.