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On Tuesday, Stability AI announced that famend filmmaker James Cameron—of Terminator and Skynet fame—has joined its board of administrators. Stability is greatest identified for its pioneering however extremely controversial Stable Diffusion sequence of AI image-synthesis fashions, first launched in 2022, which might generate pictures primarily based on textual content descriptions.
“I’ve spent my profession in search of out rising applied sciences that push the very boundaries of what’s potential, all within the service of telling unbelievable tales,” stated Cameron in a press release. “I used to be on the forefront of CGI over three a long time in the past, and I’ve stayed on the leading edge since. Now, the intersection of generative AI and CGI picture creation is the following wave.”
Cameron is probably greatest generally known as the director behind blockbusters like Avatar, Titanic, and Aliens, however in AI circles, he could also be most related for the co-creation of the character Skynet, a fictional AI system that triggers nuclear Armageddon and dominates humanity within the Terminator media franchise. Related fears of AI taking over the world have since jumped into actuality and lately sparked makes an attempt to manage existential danger from AI techniques by measures like SB-1047 in California.
In a 2023 interview with CTV information, Cameron referenced The Terminator‘s launch yr when requested about AI’s risks: “I warned you guys in 1984, and also you didn’t hear,” he stated. “I feel the weaponization of AI is the most important hazard. I feel that we are going to get into the equal of a nuclear arms race with AI, and if we don’t construct it, the opposite guys are for certain going to construct it, and so then it’ll escalate.”
Hollywood goes AI
After all, Stability AI is not constructing weapons managed by AI. As a substitute, Cameron’s curiosity in cutting-edge filmmaking strategies apparently drew him to the corporate.
“James Cameron lives sooner or later and waits for the remainder of us to catch up,” stated Stability CEO Prem Akkaraju. “Stability AI’s mission is to remodel visible media for the following century by giving creators a full stack AI pipeline to deliver their concepts to life. We’ve an unmatched benefit to realize this objective with a technological and inventive visionary like James on the highest ranges of our firm. This isn’t solely a monumental assertion for Stability AI, however the AI trade total.”
Cameron joins different current additions to Stability AI’s board, together with Sean Parker, former president of Fb, who serves as government chairman. Parker known as Cameron’s appointment “the beginning of a brand new chapter” for the corporate.
Regardless of significant protest from actors’ unions final yr, components of Hollywood are seemingly starting to embrace generative AI over time. Final Wednesday, we covered a deal between Lionsgate and AI video-generation firm Runway that may see the creation of a customized AI mannequin for movie manufacturing use. In March, the Monetary Occasions reported that OpenAI was actively displaying off its Sora video synthesis mannequin to studio executives.
Unstable occasions for Stability AI
Cameron’s appointment to the Stability AI board comes throughout a tumultuous interval for the corporate. Stability AI has confronted a sequence of challenges this previous yr, together with an ongoing class-action copyright lawsuit, a troubled Secure Diffusion 3 mannequin launch, vital management and workers modifications, and ongoing monetary issues.
In March, founder and CEO Emad Mostaque resigned, adopted by a spherical of layoffs. This got here on the heels of the departure of three key engineers—Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz, who’ve since based Black Forest Labs and launched a brand new open-weights image-synthesis mannequin known as Flux, which has begun to take over the r/StableDiffusion group on Reddit.
Regardless of the problems, Stability AI claims its fashions are extensively used, with Secure Diffusion reportedly surpassing 150 million downloads. The corporate states that 1000’s of companies use its fashions of their inventive workflows.
Whereas Secure Diffusion has certainly spawned a big group of open-weights-AI picture lovers on-line, it has additionally been a lightning rod for controversy amongst some artists as a result of Stability initially skilled its fashions on tons of of thousands and thousands of pictures scraped from the Internet with out in search of licenses or permission to make use of them.
Apparently that affiliation shouldn’t be a priority for Cameron, based on his assertion: “The convergence of those two completely totally different engines of creation [CGI and generative AI] will unlock new methods for artists to inform tales in methods we might have by no means imagined. Stability AI is poised to guide this transformation.”
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