The resignation comes amid a growing debate over the 'harvesting' of copyrighted music by generative AI platforms. Recently, artist Bad Bunny expressed anger over an AI-generated track that replicates his vocals. The track's maker, FlowGPT, responded by offering to let the artist re-record the track for free, but threatened to upload a new version if the original was removed from digital platforms. Newton-Rex hopes his resignation will encourage others to speak up against the exploitation of creators in generative AI.
Key takeaways:
- Ed Newton-Rex, a prominent figure in the evolution of generative AI in music, has resigned from his role at Stability AI due to a disagreement over the company's stance on 'fair use' of copyrighted material.
- Stability AI, along with other large generative AI companies, believes that training AI models on copyrighted works does not infringe on the copyright, a position that Newton-Rex disagrees with.
- Newton-Rex argues that generative AI models can be used to create works that compete with the copyrighted works they are trained on, which he believes cannot be considered fair use.
- He calls for others within generative AI companies to speak up against the exploitation of creators, stating that he can only support generative AI that doesn't exploit creators by training models on their work without permission.