Amazing stuff. It’s unfortunate that you have to be a famous blogger to get access to this. It’s been said enough at this point but it really goes against the spirit of OpenAI and what they ostensibly stand for.
And before anyone even says it… obviously they have to try and prevent child porn. That’s settled US Law with regards to artistic depictions of underage sex. However everything else they are preventing (and would ban you for if they caught you deliberately found a way to trick it into producing) is protected artistic expression under freedom of speech, first amendment stuff.
This artistic tool is built to prevent you trying to create content containing certain concepts which is a fundamental new factor in how artistic tools shape the art that is created with them.
And in case my viewpoint isn’t clear, I don’t think it’s a good thing, and that we should not allow it to become normal. I don’t object to its existence, because I understand corporate politics and how it leads to this. But this sort of crippled tool has all the concerning potentials of “newspeak” in Orwell’s 1984, except to art not to language.
But is the comparison to 'art' apt?
The platonic ideal is that this will work like the holodeck from the Enterprise, but the skill is all in the machine, there is no effort or skill for the consumer aside from the decision what she wants to see.
I can enter "monkey on a bicycle" in the Google image search and Google shows me pictures of monkeys on bikes. Dalle works exactly the same. Is Googles image search for that reason like a paint brush? Should it make illegal content available? I don't think so, it is a content service. A future Dalle-22 may be virtually indistinguishable from Youtube or Pornhub and A) it should be able decide what it wants to be and B) be bound by the same laws like youtube or pornhub.
This is the way it’s an artistic tool. You can say “monkey on a bicycle” and sure you get it randomly generating stuff, but if I ask for “capuchin monkey riding a red schwin bicycle with whitewall tires and a basket on the front handlebars” I’ve used the tool to craft a specific image I’ve constructed in my imagination, it becomes a tool to take what I have imagined and realise it, it’s an artistic tool just like the photoshop contextual fill tool is an art tool, just way more advanced.
As for future iterations… I don’t see any reason to assume that “Dall-E 22” or even “Dall-E 44” will somehow gain sentience and have tastes or be capable of deciding what content it want to produce for us. The “Tastes” of this model are determined by its training data, as is what it is capable of generating, you mentioned PornHub and that’s a great example, no matter how good the model gets at generating photorealistic things from descriptions, if they don’t include anything in the training data that’s labeled as “dildo” then the mode will have no way of knowing what to generate and will just produce randomised nonsense… so again you would be forced to use it as an artistic tool, to describe the scene constructively like they do with their dead horse example, “horse sleeping in a lake of red liquid” produced an image that looked like a dead horse in a lake of blood. If you have to do this then you are “painting” a scene by writing an elaborate description of everything in it and are using the model as an artistic tool in order to produce the visual image you want.
I'm not clear what you mean by this. The laws regarding CSAM vary a lot across the USA because of the different states and then federal law on top. After a federal Supreme Court ruling that virtual images didn't meet the definition of CSAM a lot of jurisdictions modified their statutes to make constructed images also illegal (e.g. cartoons like "lolicon" come under this). It really comes down to where in the USA you live, and remembering that for most Internet crimes the state can charge you and also the federal government can also charge you. I wouldn't screw with these laws either. If I remember correctly there is one US state that has a mandatory minimum of 100 years in prison for a single image.
I think that ship has finally sailed with this recent release that allows deage-deepfakes:
$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 16269536 kB
So while it’s a fair position to take that banning it is absurd… as a Corporation in US legal jurisdictions such as I believe California, Washington and Delaware, they will have to comply with state law regarding such matters in three separate jurisdictions, easiest way being to completely prevent the objectionable content entirely.
I think it makes perfect sense to ban child porn, and strongly support it.
Given the fact that millions upon millions of children play incredibly violent video games without feeling the urge to go on killing sprees, I'd say what you're saying is completely specious, but I can understand that critical thinking can be difficult.