Coin World News Report:
Stability AI has released an improved community license for its Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3) model in an attempt to calm the controversy that erupted after its initial release. This move by the company comes after the major community hub CivitAI issued a ban on all SD3-related content due to licensing issues.
In a statement released on Friday evening, Stability acknowledged that their latest version, SD3 Medium, did not meet the high expectations of their community. “We have listened to your feedback and made improvements to address your concerns and continue supporting the open-source community,” they said.
According to the new terms, Stability AI allows free usage of SD3 for research, non-commercial, and limited commercial purposes. The license also permits individuals and businesses with annual revenue below $1 million to use the model for free. Those exceeding this threshold must obtain a paid enterprise license.
In an interview with Stability, the company confirmed that it is possible to create custom SD3 models and make improvements upon the base SD3. However, the use of images generated by SD3 as part of their training dataset to develop new competing models of Stable Diffusion is prohibited.
A spokesperson for Stability AI told Decrypt, “Derivative products include any outputs derived from Stability AI’s base models, such as fine-tuned models or other creative outputs. Examples of derivative works include SD3 fine-tuning, LoRA fine-tuning, adapters, etc., which can also be trained using SD3 output images.”
The license also stipulates that “you are the owner of derivative works you create, subject to Stability AI’s ownership of Stability AI materials and any derivative works made by or for Stability AI.” In other words, as long as these boundaries are respected, fine-tuning and profiting from it should not violate the terms and conditions.
The company spokesperson told Decrypt, “To protect our intellectual property, using SD3 output as training data to train new base AI models is not allowed, and all activities must comply with our acceptable use policy.”
Stability AI claims that the updated license reaffirms the principles of open-source, emphasizing creator freedom, research consistency, and community focus. The company promises to remove restrictions on the number of generated media files and assures users below the revenue threshold that they do not need to remove their outputs or fine-tuned models.
To top it off, the company pledges to update its model to address the issues users found in the first version, specifically the catastrophic depiction of human anatomical structures that resulted in monstrous images when asked to generate a person lying on the floor.
The spokesperson told Decrypt, “We are continuously researching improvements in different aspects of the technology, and we will release these details with the next model release.”
“One-star” reviews
Despite Stability AI’s efforts to smooth things over, not everyone in the AI community is convinced. Kent Keirsey, CEO of Invoke AI, is skeptical of the new license. Keirsey believes that the modified terms fail to address the fundamental issues and introduce new complexities.
In his analysis of the new terms and conditions on YouTube, he said, “I have to say the new license for SD3 is an old problem. I know it’s being touted as solving the problem, but it doesn’t really solve the concerns of the people I see who really care about building businesses around this.”
Keirsey pointed out several issues with the license, including Stability AI’s ability to terminate the agreement at will. While this may be normal for many software licenses, it is not part of the most significant open-source licenses like GPL or Apache. In fact, the license for the previous model, SDXL, was irrevocable.
“I give this one star,” he concluded. “It’s a one-star license, maybe one and a half stars because it’s better than the previous one.”
Andrew Hayward, Editor