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Cameron joins other recent additions to Stability AI’s board, including Sean Parker, former president of Facebook, who serves as executive chairman. Parker called Cameron’s appointment “the start of a new chapter” for the company.
Despite significant protest from actors’ unions last year, elements of Hollywood are seemingly beginning to embrace generative AI over time. Last Wednesday, we covered a deal between Lionsgate and AI video-generation company Runway that will see the creation of a custom AI model for film production use. In March, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI was actively showing off its Sora video synthesis model to studio executives.
Unstable times for Stability AI
Cameron’s appointment to the Stability AI board comes during a tumultuous period for the company. Stability AI has faced a series of challenges this past year, including an ongoing class-action copyright lawsuit, a troubled Stable Diffusion 3 model launch, significant leadership and staff changes, and ongoing financial concerns.
In March, founder and CEO Emad Mostaque resigned, followed by a round of layoffs. This came on the heels of the departure of three key engineers—Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz, who have since founded Black Forest Labs and released a new open-weights image-synthesis model called Flux, which has begun to take over the r/StableDiffusion community on Reddit.
Despite the issues, Stability AI claims its models are widely used, with Stable Diffusion reportedly surpassing 150 million downloads. The company states that thousands of businesses use its models in their creative workflows.
While Stable Diffusion has indeed spawned a large community of open-weights-AI image enthusiasts online, it has also been a lightning rod for controversy among some artists because Stability originally trained its models on hundreds of millions of images scraped from the Internet without seeking licenses or permission to use them.
Apparently that association is not a concern for Cameron, according to his statement: “The convergence of these two totally different engines of creation [CGI and generative AI] will unlock new ways for artists to tell stories in ways we could have never imagined. Stability AI is poised to lead this transformation.”
