A spokesperson for Stability.AI told MIT Technology Review: ”We are listening to artists and the community and working with collaborators to improve the dataset. This involves allowing people to opt out of the model and also to opt in when they are not already included.”
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.
The Concept Art Association is raising $270,000 to hire a full-time lobbyist in Washington, DC, in hopes of bringing about changes to US copyright, data privacy, and labor laws to ensure that artists’ intellectual property and jobs are protected. The group wants to update laws on intellectual property and data privacy to address new AI technologies, require AI companies to adhere to a strict code of ethics, and work with labor unions and industry groups that deal with creative work.