FAQ

Spawning is a term we created to describe the act of creating entirely new media with an AI system trained on older media. We felt it was necessary to distinguish that this process is different from older techniques like sampling or collage.

What do you mean by opting in or out of
AI models?

AI spawning systems like OpenAI’s DALL·E or Stable Diffusion are trained on billions of images. 

These systems allow for anyone to generate artwork in the style of artists and individuals who are well represented in their training set. If you would like to see if your art or likeness is currently in popular AI training datasets, you can use our tool haveibeentrained?, and register to use our opt-in and opt-out tools in beta.

We believe that both the AI research community and the artist community will benefit from this training being consensual.

All kinds of artists. Whether you are a visual artist, musician, designer, writer or filmmaker, we feel our tools can be beneficial for you. 

There are no guarantees that copyright will be sufficient to protect artists from AI training, so we have little choice but to operate assuming it will not.

While legal proceedings that determine the fate of copyrighted works are out of our hands, what is within our grasp is the ability to conceive of a new era of consenting interactions around artist data.

A new era offers us the opportunity to reconfigure how we treat IP! We believe that the best path forward is to offer individual artists tools to manage their style and likenesses, and determine their own comfort level with a changing technological landscape.

We are not focussed on chasing down individuals for experimenting with the work of others. Our concern is less with artists having fun, rather with the industrial scale usage of artist training data.

On a smaller level, we do see a lot of potential in offering official channels to experiment with artist training data and establish channels for provenance and remuneration, similar to what we pioneered with Holly+.

How does an artist get approved to use Spawning tools?

Once you have applied for beta access, a human will curate and verify access for artists on a case by case basis. We seek to ensure that data is labelled accurately.

Yes, although we have a tool in the works for promptists too. We feel that verifying and labelling good artist data expands the palette for promptists. As a result of our efforts there will be more to prompt and experiment with. We respect promptists as artists in their own right.

Spawning’s API is designed to help companies and individuals manage and validate their datasets by checking against our registry of non-consenting data. This allows users to update their products and datasets, ensuring that non-consenting data is not used, promoting ethical data usage, and reducing potential legal risks.

Companies and individuals who work with datasets, train AI models, or aggregate data can benefit from using Spawning’s API. Our API helps our users ensure that their datasets and models are compliant with data consent regulations, demonstrating a commitment to clean data practices.

Spawning’s API enables users to submit large lists of URLs to our API, which then checks our databases for any data that has been opted out by the copyright owners. The API returns information on whether the data at those URLs has been requested to be excluded from training data, allowing users to update their datasets and models accordingly.

To get started with Spawning’s API, sign up for a free API key ︎︎︎. Once you have your API key, you can access our API documentation, which provides detailed information on how to integrate the API with your application and use it to validate your datasets.