Copyright has been one of the big topics within AI over the last year and a half, as content creators, writers, and photographers navigate what it means for large language models (LLMs) learn from and train on their material.
But Kent Keirsey, Atlanta-based founder of Invoke AI, says it is time for creatives to start focusing on building their own generative models.
“We have this myth in our minds of AI being some big machine. But the reality is AI can be something that everybody has that is local on their machine, that is private, that is theirs, and that they can create with,” he told Hypepotamus.
Keirsey and his team is building Invoke AI to help content creators, gamers, marketers, and those in the entertainment sector train and generate with their own AI models that are “specialized in their style or in their IP.”
This can be very powerful for gaming or movie studios that have a lot of previous content and are looking to build up their library.
“AI has really lowered the barrier to entry for indie movie makers, indie creators, and that puts a lot of pressure on the big studios, the big game publishers, and the movie makers,” he added.
The team at Invoke sees AI as “an acceleration, not a replacement” for the creative community. It is built on Stable Diffusion, a platform that is essential for the world of image generation today.
Invoke AI is built intentionally as an open-source platform, something that Keirsey said is designed to enable more creatives to harness the power of AI. 
FUNDING IN THE AI WORLD
Keirsey has made his way around the Atlanta startup ecosystem, serving as Director of Product Management at fintech Greenlight and Senior Product Manager at Gather, an event management platform acquired by Tripleseat in 2020. In 2018 he founded ProductATL, a community for local product professionals.
It has been a busy year for him as the founder and CEO of Invoke AI. In less than a year, the team closed a $3.75 million seed round. The round, which closed this September, was led by Palo Alto-based Storm Ventures, with participation by SignalFire and Universe Software.
Storm Ventures is no stranger to the Atlanta startup scene, as it invested in Gather in 2016 and Salesloft’s Series A in 2015.
Kiersey said the funding was needed to ensure that Invoke AI can serve enterprise use cases and added that the new investors on the cap table have been crucial in Invoke’s recent hiring efforts.
