Hacker News Reader

Comment by optimalsolver | Hacker News Reader

Did OpenAI (Dall-E) and Google (Imagen) know Stable Diffusion was coming?

I'm sure they were looking forward to many months of maintaining highly exclusive access and playing "too dangerous to release" games before SD completely upended the table.

View on HN

I don't know if they saw it coming or not, but frankly I'm glad it did.

This idea of "technology gatekeeping" sickens me. I'm tired to death of people saying some non-sensical horseshit like, "The technology is too dangerous to be turned over to the hoi polloi!!"

Give me a break... as if someone running StableDiffusion on their home system and creating naked centaur-women out of pictures of Kate Beckinsale and anime waifus out of Ariana Grande photos are going to cause the downfall of the modern era.

StableDiffusion didn't upend the table... StableDiffusion gave the plans to the printing press to every person out there that wants to learn how to make their own print shop... and more power to them all, I say. I've had more fun and learned more about AI models in the past week than in I've had with AI in the past year, and I've been using img2img to feed my own art into SD to create whole new works that I've been able to touchup in Photoshop and upscale to print resolution.

This is truly the kind of computing revolution that I love to see, and that comes around all too infrequently. The good from this will far, far outweigh any negatives.

Technology gatekeeping is completely antithetical to the hacker spirit.

Hackers built all this technology. There's no way a handful of megacorps are going to take it all for themselves.

Right, like no megacorp ever prevented us from doing whatever we want for our smartphones. Oh wait. (No Pixels don't count, unless you can write your own TEE, your own sensor hub, and your own wake up word)

I'm not saying they can't try, and succeed for a while. But eventually, we will always break free.

Pixel exists (but apparently doesn't count because it's not perfect yet).

Librem exists.

PinePhone exists.

More will exist in the future.

The "Librem is to iPhone as Stable Diffusion is to DALL-E" analogy breaks down when you consider that Librem phone works about 10% as well as an iPhone, whereas SD works 110% as well as DALL-E.

Linux also used to be a "hobby" OS. Now it powers the internet. Things change.

It took Linux a couple of decades to get to that point. And it had immense business value in having such a massive infrastructure open for everyone.

For hardware our world is not there yet and won't be for quite a forseeable future.

"open source" hardware is never going to work the same way as open source software does. Hardware is fundamentally capital-intensive to produce. Software can be produced (compiled) using hardware that many people have readily available. This is a fundamental, intractable difference.

It's the difference between free knitting patterns and free cardigans.

> This idea of "technology gatekeeping" sickens me. I'm tired to death of people saying some non-sensical horseshit like, "The technology is too dangerous to be turned over to the hoi polloi!!"

I think that misrepresents OpenAI's attitude. As I see it, their claim is closer to "let's discuss whether the stable door should be closed before we find out the hard way what makes the horse bolt".

Given how much trouble we already get from the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, and how many people take spirits and horoscopes seriously, it seems entirely plausible to me that some highly realistic centaur picture could be used as a casus belli for a popular uprising that effectively ends a nation.

(Similar rumours abound even without this tech, c.f. Catherine the Great or Malleus Maleficarum etc.; I suspect arbitrary photorealistic pictures make that kind of drama much more likely to occur and to stick harder when it does, but this suspicion is not strongly held).

Edit:

I want to add that my concerns from tech are less about the general public (most people are basically decent), but from the few percent who hate or fear who now have a much easier time promoting their views (the possibility having always existed is different from it being cheap), and also from those who don't realise the images are generated to fit the text and instead think it's a search engine of existing images (which appears to be a common view judging by the type of complaint certain artists have on any given demonstration of the tech, though public figures complaining about Google search results without knowing they're personalised is also a thing even for actual search).

Anyone moderately plugged into the AI art knew for at least 2 months.

I'm guessing those teams didn't know in that they're AI researchers, and in my own employment at Google, I've been regularly reminded that being a technologist and being someone obsessed with a technology and pursuing it socially are different things.

Even without knowing the precise individuals that'd do it, I knew in February that by August there would be an open source model challenging state of the art back then, if only because given 6 months _some_ open source team would try scaling to a bigger model.

Another thing to point out is these teams are descendants of open source, Katherine Crawsons open source breakthroughs led to substantial improvements in DallE. Everyone should be saying her name 1000x more often.* She also helped create Stable Diffusion specifically, in substantial ways

* I think. Maybe I misunderstand the technology dramatically. But I think it's just poorly understood how much she's been involved.

> Another thing to point out is these teams are descendants of open source, Katherine Crawsons open source breakthroughs led to substantial improvements in DallE. Everyone should be saying her name 1000x more often.* She also helped create Stable Diffusion specifically, in substantial ways

Not only that, but OpenAI didn't seem to know their CLIP model could be used to generate images (via Advad's CLIP+VQGAN) at all, otherwise they wouldn't have released it. So they did unintentionally start the "AI art" movement even if they didn't release a trained DALLE.

Well Google's paper showed you don't need CLIP anyway. T5 and other languages model can be used regardless.

CLIP isn't the true blocker to entry, the dataset and compute is.

StableDiffusion has an open dataset, was funded by one guy, and apparently took "much less than $600k" to train on AWS (https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1563965366061211660).

So it seems there actually aren't many barriers to entry at all. There's certainly a lot of legal questions, but if it's this easy to create your own model then it's hard to enforce anything…

I don't think there are actually major legal concerns. Copyright protects reproduction of a specific image. Looking at an image and producing something in a similar style is not copyright infringement, it's called being an artist. The law on this seems pretty clear.

The UK recently announced plans to make this completely explicit, to remove any remaining doubt: "For text and data mining, we plan to introduce a new copyright and database exception which allows TDM for any purpose. Rights holders will still have safeguards to protect their content, including a requirement for lawful access."

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/artificial-intel...

I was wondering about trademark issues with a model that can draw new pictures of Mickey Mouse/Homer Simpson/Hatsune Miku if prompted with their names.

Too dangerous to release, a codeword for selling access at 100% markup.

Bonus points: If dall-e rejects an output image because it thinks the image is inappropriate they won't show it. But they will still charge you for the prompt.

Is there even a public keyword list of words you’re not supposed to include?

I wonder if they keep that private to avoid people finding work arounds.

It’s perhaps not a simple list but an AI classifier, perhaps GPT-3 based.

Nuclear was apparently confirmed on the list, but I have recently used it to generate cool things around nuclear power. So suppose it is like you say.

There is no public list. Someone on reddit compiled a very limited list here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wa3jt6/banned_words...

The problem is that they will automatically ban accounts that trigger the filter too much, so people would have to burn a whole lot of accounts to assemble an even remotely-complete list.

Holy shit that list is insane. A lot of those words being banned would limit you enormously if you're trying to create art.

But it never has been about art?

This list seems incomplete. I've had the filter triggered on words like 'thong' as in thong slippers as well.

How is this legal? If someone commissions a painting from you, you're not allowed to just say "I'm not giving you the painting, but I'm keeping your money." Why does doing it with a computer make it okay?

I think the fact those diffusion models are smaller and compute efficient than gigantic GPT models are in fact make them easier to use and distribute.

BLOOM is out there, but not that many individuals with have like 8 3090 to host them, and the inference is still incredibly slow nevertheless

BLOOM also doesn’t have GPT-3’s RLHF tuning, so anyone who tries to ask it questions or give it instructions in the manner GPT-3 supports will be disappointed. You have to k-shot prompt it or fine-tune it yourself for it to be useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com