Earlier this week, Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and technologist, wrote on X that he was leaving his position as vice president of audio at StabilityAI, a Palo Alto-based startup best known for the image-generation software Stable Diffusion.
“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,” Newton-Rex wrote. However, he wrote he’d grown increasingly concerned with the company’s “prevailing opinion on fair use at the company.” StabilityAI took the position that using the work of artists, writers, and musicians to train its generative A.I. models should be considered “fair use” under copyright law — and that those creators are not entitled to compensation.
