Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

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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).

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