Stability AI's latest major model release, Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3), has faced strong opposition from the AI community due to its restrictive licensing terms. This controversy has led to a ban on the Stable Diffusion community hub, which on Monday prohibited activities related to SD3.
SD3 users are concerned about the potential impact of the licensing terms on future model development and improvements, which traditionally rely on contributions and participation from the open-source community. Stability AI has now introduced a "creator license" for consumers, applicable only to developers with annual incomes under $1 million, institutional funds under $1 million, and monthly active users under 1 million. The license also limits the number of images generated monthly to 6,000. Anyone needing to exceed these limits must pay for an enterprise license.
As developers begin to adapt SD3 for specific use cases, the situation becomes more complex. Kent Kiersey, CEO of InvokeAI, explained in a YouTube video: "The crux of the matter is that every time you train any model, even if it's not SD3, a derivative work is created. This means that any output from model training could be considered a derivative work, subject to Stability AI's licensing terms."
CivitAI Bans SD3
The situation escalated to CivitAI—the world's largest Stable Diffusion resource repository, which recently announced a temporary ban on all resources related to SD3 to avoid potential legal issues with the licensing agreement. CivitAI stated they are seeking legal advice and further clarification of the licensing terms with Stability AI.
Currently, models and resources can still be accessed on Stability's own Huggingface repository, but SDXL+SD3 merges and other resources hosted on Civitai servers are currently unavailable anywhere.
In addition to licensing issues, SD3 also faces problems with generating specific human poses, making its future even more uncertain. Stability AI's recent CEO departure and layoffs have put the company in a position where it needs to increase revenue to continue operations, but it needs to explain the new SD3 licensing agreement and its impact on a large number of developers' work.
The entire controversy has potential implications for the entire AI community and the development of open-source AI models. Nevertheless, SD3 has been downloaded over 2.7 million times on HugginFace, more popular than SDXL Turbo and stable level cascades, and has received over 34,000 clicks on Civitai.