We are the Concept Art Association, an advocacy organization for artists working in entertainment. Our board member, Karla Ortiz, has been one of the leaders in our industry fighting back against the unethical practices happening in the AI text-to-image space. As an organization and as individuals we deeply care about this issue, not just for those actively working as visual artists, but for future generations of artists and for the preservation of our creative industries. A text-to-image model takes input from a user in the form of a natural language prompt and produces an image matching that prompt. To condition that capability the model needs to be trained on a huge collection of images, media, and text descriptions scraped from the web and collected in the form of a "dataset " in order to extract and encode an intricate statistical survey of the dataset's items.

A spokesperson for Stability.AI told MIT Technology Review: "We are listening to artists and the community and working with collaborators to improve the dataset. This involves allowing people to opt out of the model and also to opt in when they are not already included." But Karla Ortiz, an artist and a board member of the Concept Art Association, an advocacy organization for artists working in entertainment, says she doesn't think Stability.AI is going far enough. The fact that artists have to opt out means "that every single artist in the world is automatically opted in and our choice is taken away," she says. "The only thing that Stability.AI can do is algorithmic disgorgement, where they completely destroy their database and they completely destroy all models that have all of our data in it," she says.