Stability AI CEO Prem Akkaraju opened AI Creator Day 2026 with a simple thesis. “Creators don’t just create content. You know, creators create change,” he told What’s Trending founder and CEO Shira Lazar, who moderated the State of the Union session.
Stability AI makes the Stable Diffusion image models, which have been downloaded more than 354 million times. Before that, Akkaraju was CEO of Weta Digital, the Oscar-winning visual effects company behind “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Game of Thrones.” He argued creators have already reshaped distribution, marketing and the way fans connect with the people they follow.
That view drives how his company builds. Stability works with creatives instead of building for them from the outside, he said. James Cameron sits on its board, and record labels help shape its audio models. “I find it incomprehensible to create creator tools without creatives,” he said.
He also expects creator contracts to change. Today’s deals mostly pay for finished work, but Akkaraju thinks they’ll start covering what goes into training AI models too. “You should be compensated on the input and the output,” he said.
His case for AI came down to two constraints. “There’s only two evils in content creation. It’s time and money,” Akkaraju said.
TheWrap and What’s Trending presented AI Creator Day 2026 at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles on Sept. 29, the day before TheGrill. Sponsors included Artlist, Cantina, CapCut, Fairground Entertainment, Native Foreign, pocket.watch, Rebel Audio, UTA and Wispr Flow, the official voice partner, whose Notetaker captured the quotes in this story.
