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Comment by thorum | Hacker News Reader

The author (Stability.AI’s CIO) did an impromptu AMA on Reddit:

https://reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y9ga5s/stabili...

His comments regarding RunwayML’s release of 1.5 were especially interesting:

> “No they did not. They supplied a single researcher, no data, not compute and none of the other reseachers. So it’s a nice thing to claim now but it’s basically BS. They also spoke to me on the phone, said they agreed about the bigger picture and then cut off communications and turned around and did the exact opposite which is negotiating in bad faith.”

> “I’m saying they are bad faith actors who agreed to one thing, didn’t get the consent of other researchers who worked hard on the project and then turned around and did something else.”

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Thank you, I think this is the root of everything: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y9ga5s/com...

>We want to crush any chance of CP. If folks use it for that entire generative AI space will go radioactive and yes there are some things that can be done to make it much much harder for folks to abuse and we are working with THORN and others right now to make it a reality.

This is utterly ridiculous. Even if the generated content is repulsive, it’s still generated; no one is being harmed. Stop this babysitting nonsense.

Its not really black/white. Deepfakes can be traumatizing to the victims.

Isn’t the dream to use this stuff to generate virtual CSAM? Could you not kill the CSAM market overnight by flooding it with AI-generated material?

It is an interesting ethical question that needs more research done in to it. Though given how people's brains tend to shut down upon hearing the topic, I feel like the general public would be vastly opposed to it even if it was proven to lead to better societal outcomes (decreased child abuse).

there is a history to that. In some US states it became illegal to have cgi images of CP , Secondlife had that problem and they still ban it. I think it got turned down on free speech grounds but there are still some kind of restrictions

Those restrictions made sense in a world without Stable Diffusion because CGI images were thought to stimulate interest in photorealistic CSAM and photorealistic CSAM couldn't be acquired without outright acquiring actual CSAM.

Now that we can readily generate photorealistic CSAM, there's little to no risk of inadvertently creating an customer base for actual CSAM.

They are never going to accept that argument.

I mean, some SD applications like the interior designer market this as a great tool for potential buyers to try out ideas before they buy.

The only way to do that is to not release the model, not let people run the model locally, and basically turn it into DALL-E with a web UI and rented compute. Which defeats the entire point of Stable Diffusion.

Which centralizes control of new tech and prevents innovation imho. Would be a shitty development.

You can use AI in two steps, one for the general image and the second one to change the age, with access only to the crop of the head. There was a novel by Asimov where someone did a crime by composing the actions of two robots, who were doing perfectly legal things each one separately.

>> We want to crush any chance of CP. If folks use it for that entire generative AI space will go radioactive and yes there are some things that can be done to make it much much harder for folks to abuse and we are working with THORN and others right now to make it a reality.

I'm absolutely certain Linux has been used to kill children. Detergent, pesticide, and even pillows too!

Tools shouldn't be limited based on what the worst way they can be used. Stable diffusion is an absolute positive for society. Even when it's used to generate CP, every image that model creates is not one that involves a real kid.

The cat is out of the bag when OpenAI announced DALLE. Stable Diffusion only accelerated it a bit. Even if Sablity or lawmakers manage to prevent or outlaw open models, criminals will continue to build their own and ignore laws.

The only thing their reluctance does is harm Stability and give their competition a chance to catch up. Perhaps that's a good thing. Maybe it's time for another organization to take the lead.

This is what happens when people/legislators choose to not see further than their own noses.

Many products benefit pedophiles in one way or another. Mobile phones, computers, video editing software, cars (vans?).

"But that's ridiculous, of course we can't prohibit cars just because they can be used by criminals."

Exactly.

> criminals will continue to build their own and ignore laws

More specifically, researchers and hobbyists would be made criminals in this hypothetical. Why would I stop playing with ML just because someone passed a useless and poorly thought out law?

You can make child pornography with a can of paint and your hand. What a totally laughable farce and excuse. People are making (notice the tense) REAMS of pornography with AI just as they have with literally every technology that has ever been invented to produce creative works.

I just had the (very unreflected) thought that generated CP is better than sharing actual victim's pictures? Might be too short-sighted, didn't think about it that hard. But (preventing CP by using) this tech will not prevent CP nor sexual assault of minors.

I get the dilemma as a creator though. I wouldn't want my products to be used that way too.

If the results don't have enough artifacts to identidy it as ai generated, that could give cover to collections of images where actual minors were involved. Not great.

That's a good point! To be fair, there's just no good solution here imho.

I'm very interested in this tech and have been working with it. I have heard tell of a CSAM model. I wont say anymore because I don't want to feed that hideous fire.

I would add though - if Moore's law continues this will be almost unstoppable in a decade or too.

Runway is the original creator of the latent diffusion model. See this https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/discus...

I'm impressed by how this panned out. A few months ago, before things had worsened this much, Emad(Stability CEO) was talking on discord how happy he was about the inpainting model being trained and released soon.

At that point, I assume RunwayML too talked about releasing it.

Then, a few months later they released it.

And suddenly the response is "How dare they"?

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