Stability AI’s SD3 faced opposition due to licensing issues, and the CivitAI community banned related content

Stability AI's latest release, Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3), has triggered a strong backlash from the AI ​​community due to its strict licensing terms. The license terms restricted the commercial use of the model and imposed strict restrictions on individual developers and institutions, leading to actions by several important Stable Diffusion community platforms, such as CivitAI temporarily banning all resources related to SD3 to circumvent potential Legal Risks. The move sparked widespread discussion about the future development of open source AI models and the relationship between large AI companies and developers.

Stability AI's latest major model release, Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3), is facing backlash from the AI ​​community due to its restrictive licensing terms. The controversy prompted a ban on the Stable Diffusion community center, which on Monday banned SD3-related Work. SD3 users are concerned about the potential impact of the SD3 license terms on future model development and improvements, which have traditionally relied on open source community contributions and participation. Stability AI is now launching a consumer-facing “creator license” that is only available to developers with less than $1 million in annual revenue, less than $1 million in institutional funding, and less than 1 million monthly active users. The license also limits the number of images generated per month to 6,000. Anyone who requires more than these limits must pay the enterprise license fee.

The situation becomes more complicated as developers start adapting SD3 to specific use cases. Kent Kilsey, CEO of InvokeAI, explained in a YouTube video: "The key is that every time you train any model, even if it is not SD3, a derivative work is generated, which means that the output of any model training may be Considered a derivative work and subject to the license terms of Stability AI.” CivitAI prohibits SD3 upgrade. CivitAI, the world’s largest Stable Diffusion resource repository, recently announced a temporary ban on all resources related to SD3 to avoid possible license agreements. legal issues. CivitAI said they are seeking legal advice and are working with Stability AI to further clarify the licensing terms. Currently, models and resources are still available on Stability's own Huggingface repository, but the SDXL+SD3 merge and other resources hosted on Civitai servers are currently not available anywhere. In addition to licensing issues, SD3 also faces an inability to generate specific human poses, making its future even more uncertain. Stability AI's recent CEO departure and layoffs have left the company needing to increase revenue to continue operations, but the company needs to explain its new SD3 license agreement and its impact on a large number of developer jobs. The entire controversy has potential implications for the entire AI community and the development of open source AI models. Despite this, SD3 has been downloaded over 2.7 million times on HugginFace, is more popular than SDXL Turbo and Stable Level Cascade, and has received over 34,000 hits on Civitai.

The SD3 licensing controversy highlights the challenges faced in the development of open source AI models and also triggers discussions about the balance between business models and community contributions. Stability AI needs to find a balance between commercial interests and community support to ensure the long-term development and success of SD3.