Alex Jae Mitchell

I’ve resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI, because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’. First off, I want to say that there are lots of people at Stability who are deeply thoughtful about these issues. I’m proud that we were able to launch a state-of-the-art AI music generation product trained on licensed training data, sharing the revenue from the model with rights-holders. I’m grateful to my many colleagues who worked on this with me and who supported our team, and particularly to Emad for giving us the opportunity to build and ship it. I’m thankful for my time at Stability, and in many ways I think they take a more nuanced view on this topic than some of their competitors. But, despite this, I wasn’t able to change the prevailing opinion on fair use at the company. This was made clear when the US Copyright Office recently invited public comments on generative AI and copyright, and Stability was one of many AI companies to respond. Stability’s 23-page submission included this on its opening page: “We believe that Al development is an acceptable, transformative, and socially-beneficial use of existing content that is protected by fair use”. For those unfamiliar with ‘fair use’, this claims that training an AI model on copyrighted works doesn’t infringe the copyright in those works, so it can be done without permission, and without payment. This is a position that is fairly standard across many of the large generative AI companies, and other big tech companies building these models — it’s far from a view that is unique to Stability. But it’s a position I disagree with. I disagree because one of the factors affecting whether the act of copying is fair use, according to Congress, is “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”. Today’s generative AI models can clearly be used to create works that compete with the copyrighted works they are trained on. So I don’t see how using copyrighted works to train generative AI models of this nature can be considered fair use. But setting aside the fair use argument for a moment — since ‘fair use’ wasn’t designed with generative AI in mind — training generative AI models in this way is, to me, wrong. Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works. I don’t see how this can be acceptable in a society that has set up the economics of the creative arts such that creators rely on copyright. To be clear, I’m a supporter of generative AI. It will have many benefits — that’s why I’ve worked on it for 13 years. But I can only support generative AI that doesn’t exploit creators by training models — which may replace them — on their work without permission. I’m sure I’m not the only person inside these generative AI companies who doesn’t think the claim of ‘fair use’ is fair to creators. I hope others will speak up, either internally or in public, so that companies realise that exploiting creators can’t be the long-term solution in generative AI.

We are pleased to share that curated delivery to Spotify of new releases by Boomy artists has been re-enabled. Supporting our artists and creators who use the Boomy platform is our top priority, and we greatly appreciate your patience these past few days.

@TrungTPhan If this keeps going, making new music will be illegal!

@cheriehu42 @boomy 🤔

@StuSim @rrhoover @boomy The experience described here is closer than anyone realizes

@rrhoover This is @boomy

Who's building DALL-E for music? E.g. "Play me Thriller in the style of Marvin Gaye" (I know many people are going to hate this)

@alexalben 👽

@BraytonKey Massive scam

Lunch convo today: Is Recycling a scam?

@jherskowitz 11 (Audrey Nuna)

@jasonlk +1 for @join_arc - game-changing from a negotiation perspective in our raise. Was super fast + simple. I would be terrified of these guys if I was a seed vc.

Have you had a good experience with "non-dilutive" financing? What's your story and what vendor did you use?

@gao_zibo 🤯

"Is Coinbase a business"

Got stuck on a fraud prevention call with Chase due to a wire to Coinbase. I thought it's 2021 already?

We teamed up w/ @nycmedialab to help 4 startups develop some insanely cool technologies that explore new ways of making & interacting with music. Want to see how they work, and get a glimpse of the future of music creation? RSVP for #ASCAPExperience: bit.ly/3xoNwWB

@Aidan_Wolf A+ onboarding - but I won’t/can’t share contacts, so not for me.

Poparazzi invented Facebook photo tagging the web2 trend cycle is finally complete

“We’re not raising right now, but here is our pitch deck, financial model, and data room if you’d like to pre-empt a round.”

"The first time I went to the @BoostVC demo day, I didn't get it. And then 2 years later, all of it happened. " Come to the @BoostVC demo day with #SciFi startups. boost.vc/rsvp

@Aidan_Wolf @edwonedwon @Wizard_Skull @MoHDI Nuts

@edwonedwon @Wizard_Skull @MoHDI a digital acorn full of life that floats the groovy waves of the meta river

my diaper dog NFT is now 3d and ready to take walks across the metaverse! @Wizard_Skull @MoHDI

@TylerH Great piece 👍

👀

what they want what you want

@Aidan_Wolf Amen

a single piece of music is an audio track, music video, AR Lens, VR Show, physical album, and live concert all in one depending on where you see it, the new Internet should make music into a liquid that can be manifested in whatever form is desired

@CixLiv 🙋‍♂️ I’ll buy it

Can I sell my soul as a #NFT? Asking for a friend.