Kickstarter shuts down campaign for Unstable Diffusion amid changing guidelines
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
We need to replace platforms like Kickstarter with standards and protocols so that shutting things down because someone doesn’t like them (or even preventing people from behaving illegally, especially if you’re not the cops) can be made impossible.
Let bad ideas be rejected by society, not blocked by someone claiming to act for society. Because inevitably they don’t represent everyone, and they always end up acting with self interest, no matter how good the initial intentions.
However, at least some of this is due to underlying payment providers. Those need to be gutted and replaced. See paypal and their $2,500 fee for saying mean things on the internet.
Regulations create consequences for breaking them, and that is a good thing. Pairing regulations with control that prevents crime and civil disobedience is something completely different.
If it’s wrong, counter it with warning labels explaining who thinks it’s wrong and why.
Yes, the consequence might be that at the margins, more people believe wrong things even given the warnings (though despite some pretty concerted efforts it seems pretty conclusive to me that that’s going to happen anyway, and perhaps the desire to stem the flow of misinformation has only created more conspiracy theories), but alternative of state control of what is acceptable thought / expression is far worse.
(Note that I am fine with, and would even encourage preventing companies from profiting from furthering misinformation, for example by having algorithms that promote it beyond a account’s followers or a post’s organic reach because it produces clicks and ad revenue, but that is very different.)
I didn't vote for visa nor mastercard. I voted for the government I have and they decide what is legal and what is not.
I support breaking down this monopoly as well though, because I acknowledge the ground reality of where we are now.
I'm not part of the rep/dem "Chyna" fight. I just my countries to push the WHO to do the proper investigations because it's the only way we improve our safety standards.
So no, I can't see any value in politically driven censorship.
If you’ve actually visited places with little to zero moderation and freedom to do anything the results are troubling at best. You don’t see the best of things with zero restrictions, these places are awful.
Somalia was stateless for years, was it closer to a paradise or hell?
Go browse /b/ and tell me you wish how all social media was more like it.
Anyone can send me spam email, my spam filters pick most it up and I never see it. I’d not choose to have corporate moderation of my incoming email even if it meant less spam.
The same applies to web sites. The web is full of all sorts of things you probably don’t want to see. You don’t need it to be removed by your government in order for the whole web not to degenerate to 4chan.
I don’t follow people who share objectionable things on Twitter, and if they start to I unfollow them. The only reason I’d see the crap would be if Twitter choose to show it to me. It doesn’t need to be “moderated” (deleted) for Twitter not to show it to me if I’m not following the author or someone who retweets it (and if I am, and continue to do so, then presumably I want to see it, and that’s up to me).
It’s simply not the case that the presence of objectionable things on the internet is the root of the problem. The problem, mostly, is perverse incentives for companies to promote it.
Until we realise this we’ll keep building algorithms that are incentivised to create division and stole obsessions of all sorts to keep people online and watching ads, followed by wondering where our moderation went wrong and what extra control we can impose to finally make things better.
It won’t work.
It's not a carte blanche for censorship.
>—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
The second part is often left out of the discussion.
4chan isn't designed to actually be a great forum, but the nearly-unlimited content is not the problem. A lack of user-tools for sorting through it is.
AI art is literally working against what Kickstarter was made for.
AI art is about putting together the work that artists have done in a way that isn't technically theft (well it might be the law is very slow about reacting to this thing and you can't go after someone for copyright violation as a class action lawsuit)
If someone wanted to pay artists to create a brand new collection of art to train AI on that would be fine. However the reality is current AI art is all farmed from publicly "available" images. (Copyright law currently allows you to display images for public consumption without worrying about those images being re-appropriated, AI art bypasses that)
> Let bad ideas be rejected by society
Except society doesn't understand what is going on and explaining it requires expert testimony. Of course you can discard those complaints by just making shit up and sound nearly as convincing.
> Because inevitably they don’t represent everyone
Kickstarter didn't say they were doing this for everyone. They explicitly said they were doing it to support artists. Artists haven't universally called out AI art as theft but a ton have.
While I understand why some artists are upset, the ones who succeed in the future will be the ones who use the technology in their work, instead of those who just complain and whine.
Movements can grow unexpectedly and seemingly out of nowhere. It may be possible that enough people will enjoy the idea of living a life unencumbered by pointless junk and if so, their actions can have the power to shut down companies like OpenAI and the like.
If I could convince even one other person on this planet of the dangers of technology, I would consider the effort I put into talking about it worth it. In fact, I myself have been convinced by other people and in turn I have already spent far less money on technology because of it. Maybe it's a drop in the ocean, but drops of rain can become floods, and one day I truly hope that flood will come to completely shut down efforts like UnstableDiffusion and similar projects.
To hope that they shut down due to a lack of users is just a thought process that is only guaranteed to cause unhappiness.
I think it's very unlikely that true happiness is caused by the highly specific diversions we have created in society. I can put myself out there -- I have hobbies too. And if they stopped, I would miss them a little. But I certainly wouldn't go far as to say that would make me unhappy.
Thinking you can control others will lead to unhappiness, I think is their point.
Stealing other's work under the guise of "advancement" isn't futurism...
AI is like an alien race coming to our planet. The alien race is so advanced that it can do everything better than any human, and they use their technology to sell us perfect products of every nature in return for degrading acts. Such a thing disrupts the fabric of society, which is held together by people needing each other.
Computer programmers and tech companies are not just robbing artists, but robbing all of humanity of the necessities that we need in order to have a fair chance at this world.
More to the point, much of modern art is derivative nonsense that lacks soul - which is why it's modern artists who are scared of AI. Their work is easy to mimic.
AI isn't going to replace a Van Gogh anytime soon.
Do you then believe humanity has exhausted its well of original thoughts? That would includes you and this statement, by the way (unless you hold yourself in unnaturally high regard, or are a rogue AI)
Edit: phrasing
For my part, I'm quite content with this state of affairs. Now, rather than paying exorbitant amounts of money for lackluster results from artists, people can use so-called AI to generate decent results on the cheap. On a long enough timeline this should result in the price of art assets for games dropping into the basement where they belong, taking the price of games with them in the process. The public benefits, while intermediaries lose. I fail to see the problem.
TL;DR Humanity should not be compelled to dwell in darkness so candlemakers can continue to profit.
You also say that you hope AI will drop the price of art to the basement where it belongs. What if AI drops the cost of generating a computer program to the basement where it belongs, and programmers will be paid minimum wage? Would you be so content then?
Frankly, the attitude on this board is dismaying, but that is expected because the people who are benefiting from AI with higher salaries are currently the programmers. It has nothing to do with logic or fairness, only selfishness.
I'd be more than happy to get rid of the "programmers" that are generating the same quality code as Copilot. Engineers are employed to translate human needs into tangible system designs, that they have to write code to do so is mostly an artefact of our current system-building methodology. In fact, I would be immensely happy if I could get rid of that part.
I mean, isn't this with achievable prompt refinement?
One could argue that it wouldn't satisfy some $arbitrary_dimension (scalability, accessibility, whatever), but you can imagine it wouldn't be hard to get there with prompt refinement eventually, especially on an AI trained to satisfy SWE requirement (and not talking about GH's Copilot,which is an early application of a fairly young technology)
What would the co-pilot equivalent be? You give it a prompt, it generates a few repos, but then you still have to understand the whole project to judge that it respects the system needs and restrictions. After a few rounds, maybe you will have to change up the code a little, but 90% code will be written by the machine. I, for one, welcome this future -- because once again, this "prompt refinement" iteration is where our human creativity is used most effectively; I think it's a significant improvement over writing boilerplate code every time.
I have a rigorous academic background in computer science and you don't see me throwing a tantrum that your average layman today can fire up unity or RPG maker to create games without having a firm grasp of rigid body Newtonian physics, game loops, asset management, graphic drivers, and handrolled x86 assembly.
My argument is not that we should avoid everything that makes tasks easier, but that AI does it on a fundamentally different scale, and that should be treated with caution.
It's like salt. I put salt on my food, but not too much. Some restaurants put way too much salt on their food but you can still eat there. AI is like eating handfuls of it, which will kill you.
We can also have a very nice and functional society without penicillin, hot water, or fire... but nobody argues in favor of getting rid of those things just because doing so would make lives more profitable for the few. In fact, most people would be horrified by the selfishness of such a suggestion.
> You also say that you hope AI will drop the price of art to the basement where it belongs. What if AI drops the cost of generating a computer program to the basement where it belongs, and programmers will be paid minimum wage? Would you be so content then?
I would, yes, since I'm not employed as a software engineer and I'm tired of cleaning up after those who are who can't write programs worth a damn.
> Frankly, the attitude on this board is dismaying, but that is expected because the people who are benefiting from AI with higher salaries are currently the programmers. It has nothing to do with logic or fairness, only selfishness.
...or we recognize your class interest for what it is and we are not impressed. Everyone is made obsolete at some point. shrug Learn to code, I guess?
2. I am not personally worried about being made obsolete. I can code just fine and have extensive coding experience, and I can do a lot of other things as well. Nonetheless, I am still opposed to it. My opinion is just that we should slow down, examine how disruptive AI can be.
3. I only ask that we be more cautious towards technology. Currently our modus operandi is invent and release anything, as long as it makes money, which I think is crazy.
Funny enough (because it's about AI Vs Artists), you can see some of these scammers here.
As usual, the devil is in the details. But we need more nuance in these debates.
A fair chance at what exactly? Creating corporate memphis for Big Co?
Besides, isn't AI just a tool that humans use? Unless I am missing something, people still prompt the AI, curate it's output, and edit the final results. Perhaps this will make art accessible to more people, thus giving everyone a fairer chance in this world.
That said, it is not theft, however you slice it. What you express is what a lot of other workers feel when they see automation and mechanisation making progress in squeezing them out of their jobs. It is normal to be afraid, but you are not going to stop the tide. Some people will get out of business, some people will keep doing their thing until they retire, and over a generation or two a shift will have happened.
If it makes you feel better, pretty much no job is immune from this, in the same way that all manual labour is susceptible to be replace with robots. Other people will feel the same way you do now before long.
How do you think humans learn art? Humans aren't magic, they learn to make art by looking at and being inspired by other art, and I'd bet quite a lot of that art is copyrighted. AIs are just doing the same thing but way faster, and I don't see any issue with that. (Same with GitHub Copilot for that matter.)
So an amount of this deals with scale and the copyright status of the prior art.
The real problem is that our definition of "plagiarism" did not anticipate, and was never intended to describe, anything even remotely like ML.
Isn't this like saying "cars are just doing the same as horse drawn carriages but faster, they shouldn't be regulated differently"? That "faster" changes the game completely. Similarly, many of the laws applying to physical actions can't be immediately transposed to electronic actions.
The current rules were made under the assumption that we're dealing with humans and "natural" laws. Like the fact that humans eventually die while an AI can live forever or transfer the entirety of useful knowledge to the next generation. A human doesn't have time to steal in a lifetime as much as an AI can do in mere minutes. A human can be punished for breaking the law, especially for repeat offenses, whereas an AI can't be even if it breaks the law more times than all human artists put together. These are all complete game changers, speed is only one of the many compounding factors. Scale changes things, a punch in the face isn't just "a gentle tap, but faster". An AI can suck in all of human knowledge and work with all of it at the speed of light.
> How do you think humans learn art?
Humans as a race have created art from literally nothing. Humans as individuals have constantly advanced it with original material. AI seems to be by definition derivative. Humans are encouraged to create something as original as possible and attacked if they borrow too much, AI in "encouraged" to copy as much as possible and as this discussion stands to prove, also to "borrow".
This at the very least invalidates the too simplistic view that AI is the same as humans but faster.
No, they didn't? Humans don't have any magic creative juices that allow them to come up with ideas out of thin air, that's silly. Ideas are created from our brain using our past experiences and knowledge, why do you think some of our earliest art is of animals?
Also, I'm not sure comparing artists to horse-drawn carriages is the best analogy to support your argument, considering horse-drawn carriages are almost nonexistent nowadays. I'd argue a better analogy would be something like chess or any other game. When computers beat humans at chess, nobody changed the rules of chess to make computers perform worse. People just acknowledged that computers were better.
In theory, you could have 1000 people watching cameras with a list of people to watch for in 1980, but in practice it was too expensive and not a consideration. Now you can cheaply record tens of thousands of hours of video indefinitely and run analyses on everyone in them. This has huge implications on freedom and society and calls for new rules.
Just because technology is doing the "same thing" that was done before at scale does not make it the same thing.
AI is the same.
> Ideas are created from our brain using our past experiences and knowledge
Humans experienced random things in life and some created art from it. Sometimes after hallucinogenic drugs they created art even from things that never existed. Then other humans created something new on top of the existing art. AI "experienced" already created art and was tasked to recombine pieces to create more art. Simply put, nobody gave an AI sounds of nature and had it come up with a symphony after some thousands of human years' equivalent of processing.
> Also, I'm not sure comparing artists to horse-drawn carriages is the best analogy to support your argument, considering horse-drawn carriages are almost nonexistent nowadays.
Not sure why this harms the analogy, it's meant to point out that "speed" makes a difference and changes the rules. Artists may also be nonexistent tomorrow. If AI is doing everything legitimately and creating art the same way as humans but faster and better, why would human artists continue to exist? And then what would you feed as training material to your AI? The dictionary definition of "love"? Sounds of nature? Art created by the previous AIs?
> When computers beat humans at chess, nobody changed the rules of chess to make computers perform worse.
Right, we just don't allow computers to play the game in official positions. Different rules, as it were.
for me art is not the end product but the process. I want to understand the artists intentions and often a work that looks blant, because deep because of the artist's explanations.
Take Agnes Martin's paintings as an example.
So what of the Dadaist, the postmodern and the rest, where art is only art because we say it is art, and the creation of art need only involve the “artist” scribbling their signature on the object to bestow it with “artistic merit”. I cannot see a good way to reconcile a philosophy (law is different here, plenty of art can be illegal, eg: graffiti) involving AI and art like this… Duchamp’s readymades, are the products of a factory’s meant for consumer use, are Art… AI art is the product of an sophisticated set of multiple software tools combined and then used by a person to produce their own artistic vision, the output is Art.
If Duchamp signing a urinal makes the urinal art then me using a prompt to craft a specific artistic outcome arguably required more creative effort to understand my “tools” and use them to produce a result that should also be considered art if I want to call it that.
I accept that we may come around and regulate and legislate these tools, just like how it’s illegal to make a graffiti masterpiece on someone’s wall without permission, it may eventually be illegal to use models trained with “unlicensed” data and the matter settled… but can we quit with this denigration of the output as somehow not actually art?
Regarding Duchamp's Urinal, the intention and the critique it voices is critical for being considered art (and a lot of people still argue about it). https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170410-the-urinal-that...
There have been a lot of upside down urinals in the world before Duchamp did that, yet nobody considered it art. Here again the intention matters. Matrix multiplications on big data don't have any intention.
However the AI process does not create a copyright (there is no human involved) and cannot use the transformative exceptions for fair use due to, again, no human being involved.
The thing to remember is AI literally copies the originals. While it mashes them together in a way that makes the lines hard to see that is in fact what it is doing.
Are they the best way to reward creation?
Do they serve humanity well?
In their entirety? No of course not.
Certainly the duration is ridiculous beyond measure.
But the idea of having no protections for your own work seems barbaric. At least for work that requires "work" for lack of a better word.
I think the laze faire nature of online memes for instance makes sense in that space.
> Are they the best way to reward creation?
I think that providing a mechanism for people to share their work without losing control of it makes sense.
> Do they serve humanity well?
While I wouldn't attribute societies recent online boon to them. I do think that having protections of this kind are one of the reasons we have seen such a huge investment in the space.
Like the current internet or not the hundreds of billions or trillions pumped into it would be harder to stomach if the internet were the wild west some would like it to be.
> a mechanism for people to share their work without losing control of it
Is impossible.
I see this argument a lot, but it cannot be true. The image database behind Stable Diffusion is 5 billion images resized to 512x512 each and compressed down to a roughly 100,000 gigabytes. But, you can run it on a model file that is as small as 2 gigabytes. The originals are not in there. They have not been compressed to 4 bits per image.
I've studied and used AI art generators for a long time now and I can tell you from both a technical and experiential POV, the images they create are not mashups.
20kb per image is like a jpeg worth of data, so certainly not throwing away anything.
A tiny model file without logic as to how you got to it isn't interesting. You could just throw away 99.5% (or whatever the ratio is) of the data and call it good. Mishmash data before you do and you might not even have to do that.
This style of AI is all about getting right past the human ability to perceive the mishmash and stop there. Given the underlying algorithm is literally about mishmashing I don't know why you are trying to fight that point.
Mishmashing implies that small clumps of pixels are in the model file somewhere. That's literally not true and has no relationship to how the algorithm actually works.
There's a ton of misinformation about how this works being tossed around. It's causing a lot of anger over ideas that simply false. That's what I'm fighting.
Don't quote the 2 GB one that one is disingenuous.
That is like copying the dictionary heap sorting by word frequency leaving only the most popular words and saying "see I couldn't have copied the dictionary it is too small to have done that".
And no the fact that it has "all" the data isn't material here.
As another commenter already pointed out, this is literally not possible. The model size for Stable Diffusion isn't nearly big enough to contain all its training data. Understanding the concepts (at least on some abstract level) of the artwork it's trained on is the only possible way a 6 GB[0] model can be based on such a massive data-set.
In conclusion, the important thing to remember is that AI does not just copy and paste the originals. It's simply not possible.
[0]: https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-diffusion-2-1/tree...
I'm getting really tired of repeating this really simple concept that AI evangelists can't seem to understand.
'Digital devices are not afforded the same "observational rights" as humans. You can't just buy an extra ticket for a video camera and take it to watch Avatar with you. And you're definitely not allowed to sell those "observations" no matter how compressed the format.'
Truly original art is rarer than 8' tall humans, but that doesn't stop the industry from existing at scale.
It would be one thing if the AI were actually trained like a human was and created unique artwork based on ideas given to it. The reality is it copy/pastes parts of images it found online.
I am not sure you understand all this, because this is exactly what Stable Diffusion does. Give or take the “like a human does”, because we don’t understand how humans work.
> The reality is it copy/pastes parts of images it found online.
It does not. This is physically impossible; the pictures used during training are orders of magnitude larger than the model. It does not contain any description of those pictures used in training and you cannot get those pictures back.
This has never worked. Society is filled with people who have to work every hour just to afford the essentials of life and can't spare a few hours to research what refrigerator will last the longest for the money much less understand content creation methodology.
When you have to decide whether to pay for a dentist bill or your retirement you have no ability to vote with your wallet over something as trivial as AI art.
Yeah, you know what they say about good art: it must play by the rules.
The market never solved the fact that it's cheaper to dump things in rivers and lakes. It never solved the fact that optimizing vehicles for the safety and comfort of those inside them is a huge risk to pedestrians, cyclists, and others outside the vehicle. It never solved the fact that it's cheaper to just keep perishable food on the shelves until it sells. It never solved the fact that claiming a medicine solves illnesses is very different from ensuring that it solves them.
Huh?
> The market never solved
I mean do you buy products that are cleaner, better to their employees, blah blah...? Do most people, if the opportunity is there? If the opportunity is not there, why not?
Seems like you're going off into space here. Capitalism and private ownership of things and ideas is great. Sorry?
Not all options are available to everyone. If the local grocer stocks one brand of milk, that is what people buy. If I need medical assistance I'm not going to research which hospitals near me stock ethically sourced bandages before calling an ambulance.
No one has time to do detailed research on every company they buy things from. I have no idea how Speedway gas treats its employees. I don't even know if their gas is better or worse than competitors. I do know that they're on the route between work and home.
Most people don't have the resources to act on these decisions. Kroger is an awful company that treats its employees like trash, but that doesn't magically make everyone able to afford Whole Foods proces. This is assuming there are multiple stores in my market, or multiple stores equally accessible to transit users, etc.
Can you quote what you're replying to?
> Not all options are available to everyone
???
> No one has time
???
> Most people don't have the resources
You're off in space. Not sure what you're on about, and I'm sure you don't know either. You don't have the solutions to the world's problems, you don't even have your life together.
A question for you: how long are a man's legs?
>I mean do you buy products that are cleaner, better to their employees, blah blah...? Do most people, if the opportunity is there? If the opportunity is not there, why not?
My reply addressed all three points. The first sentence (most people do not) was a direct response to your first two questions ("do most people?"). The rest of the post was an answer to your third.
I no longer find this conversation productive, and this will be my final reply to you.
You're surrounded by amazing advancements, only to spit in it's face: not good enough. LOL
Yeah, this isn't true at all. 40 hours per week, with strong governmental protections to compensate for more than this.
Most people clock out and go home to watch television or scroll social media. The statistics don't lie[1][2].
This meme that the "poor, downtrodden masses" are just too overworked to do anything productive with their free time has been disproven time and time again. Human beings are dopamine response state machines living in a Skinner Box. We have plenty of free time, but we consistently make poor decisions with regard to how to use it.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/06/24/americans...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/411775/average-daily-tim...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/05/multiple-job...
Nothing would stop this crowd fund there. Happens all day every day.
> I think we need decentralisation and “crypto” to succeed.
I was waiting to see if crypto could mature and fit into our society, and my impression is most succesful actors don't care about how it's used and build a business around milking "investors", and there is very little effort to talk to existing entities to make it something that could actually work in our day to day lives.
It might feel like a wild take, but focusing on decentralisation will probably be a dead end, and it's fostering the idea that crypto will succeed adversary to banks, governments and other financial institutions. I'm thinking about deposit insurance, anti-laundering laws, terrorist founding surveillance, customer fraud protection etc. There's no way crypto goes anywhere practical without those in place.
It's still fine of course for greyish activities (reward largely exceeds the risk) and anything that's small enough to fly under the radar (losses are too small to be critical), but expecting kickstarters to rely on that is adding more risks upon the mountain of risks that already exist in the business model itself.
On Kickstarter specifically, as of now Kickstarter could start processing money on its own, for instance directly exposing its bank account and have people wire in money. Or send cash in the mail. Or get physical goods sent to them that they further sell on their own. The crazy schemes would be infinite.
But the very point of Kickstarter is a secure and low friction way to pool money. Moving to crypto, the equivalent would be to have a major trusted processor take people's pledge, validate them, but keep them around until the kickstarter actually succeeds . We'd want that processor to be solid and have a long proven track record, otherwise trusting them with our crypto would be crazy. There probably won't be dozens of them, and with time they'll consolidate into perhaps 3 or 4. Or 2. And they might as well be named VCard and Masterisa.
The options to game the system at scale are limited (by design), and that builds trust in the processors.
The automatic trigger baked into the system that you describe feels to me way easier to game, with rollbacks so expensive to do that it wouldn't happen short of something catastrophic directly affecting the very powerful entities. So not just for an eggregious scam affecting a few thousand users...
If you browse /r/shittykickstarters you'll see that Kickstarter struggles to police scams even using traditional payment rails. I think crypto has the potential to make this problem better, not worse. Funding could be released over a period of time or be milestone-based.
1. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/new-kind-k...
UD is the only currently community driven alternative. I hope they deliver on what they promised.
Is this referring to artists opting-out (i.e. requesting to have their work removed) from the datasets used to create SD models? Because if so, I fully support that. In fact, I think artists should have to explicitly opt-in to their work being used in ML models. You don't get to violate someone's license terms and then point to an opt-out form to absolve yourself of liability, regardless of how good your intentions are or being a crowd-funded venture unconnected to any corporations with armies of lawyers.
ML models also appear to be more fair-use respecting than some human artists, who blatantly trace artwork. The ML model does not have the physical space to trace the works it's trained on.
As far as I can tell from a quick Wayback Machine test, that only seems to have appeared in the last fortnight[1]. None of the existing models could have been trained under the license.
[1] https://www.artstation.com/tos has it as section 46 "Artificial Intelligence" mentioning the "NoAI" tag. But https://web.archive.org/web/20221214082018/https://www.artst... has neither.
I didn't and wouldn't have backed Unstable Diffusion, but people were willing to spend money on it, it seems clearly legal from our current understanding, and there's nothing in the Kickstarter that suggests it's malicious or would otherwise violate any ToS or guidelines; in fact the campaign seems careful to suggest that they were intentionally aiming on making it difficult to abuse, which I know people have feelings about here too, but the point is that this seems like a textbook example of a project that dotted its I's and crossed its T's.
But some people didn't like it, I assume, and therefore they had to find a reason it violated their guidelines and shut it down.
I know that objectivity and neutrality are no longer hot concepts, and I also understand that not everything from the way things "used" to run would still work today, but I can't help but feel this was just a completely unnecessary concession that helps nobody. Crowdfunding was supposed to empower people to directly support things that they wanted to see, but when it goes through gatekeepers like Kickstarter and Gofundme, they become the ones with all of the power to decide what things are allowed.
I think it's probably all moot. Nobody would defend a campaign like this anyways, so trying to make the case that this is a(nother) bad precedent is impossible. People just simply don't give a shit anymore.
But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with.
It’s easy to sit back and complain about the precedent these people are setting that could be abused by other people at some point in the future. But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it?
Yeah, but Kickstarter always marketed itself as being synonymous with crowdfunding. It's the website you go to first to try to crowdfund something. That's why unstable diffusion wound up there to begin with, not because they thought it meshed well with the website or its owners, but because Kickstarter has always marketed themselves as being the all-inclusive go-to crowd funding website. In such a place, whose moral compass should guide a decision like this? The CEO? Some angry employees? Credit card processors? etc.
> But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it?
I mean, yes, of course. I'm pretty much making it clear that I would do that, for the principle of it. In my opinion that's basically what you're signing up for when you decide to run something like this. Until like 2012 or so, that used to be basically how most internet companies would operate with some exception. And like I said, I understand why it's not as applicable as it used to be; some things have changed. But this decision in particular? Not seeing the point. Seems like an unnecessary concession for a perfectly above-board project. Seems like the middleman getting in the way of the will of two parties without any real valid reason to do so.
It turns out that Kickstarter didn't really want the ones it had
When a company says “we’re the best platform for X”, what they really mean is “. . . Subject to terms and conditions and our right to refuse business that we find objectionable” and so on.
Try pulling up to an all-you-can-eat buffet with a trailer and cleaning them out of every last bit of food in the place with the “one simple trick” that they didn’t specify you had to eat it on the premises, just that you “could” eat it.
Taking any marketing (or really, any) statement as absolute and universal without bounds no matter what the context is disingenuous. Everybody knows that, even the “one simple trick” people who try to use reductive literal arguments to get away with stuff.
I think this is really the crux of the issue: That there are these quasi-monopolies for certain online services.
What's possible in crowd funding comes down to what Kickstarter does. Expected behavior of a search engine is what Google does. The standards of an online dictionary look like what Wikipedia does. And what microblogging looks like is now determined by Elon.
If in each area there was a small ecosystem of, say, three to five different players, they could each find their niche, competing on something like leniency towards such projects like Unstable Diffusion, or on how to interpret free speech etc and the users could choose the service that suits their own standards.
But since for many popular online services there is effectively a single go-to site, this one site gets to set the rules that everyone has to play by.
So how do we get more variety? I don't know. It seems to be inherent in how this market of online services works that there's always one who ends up with 99% market share.
At least in this case someone can just choose a different platform (and in fact Unstable diffusion has switched to some else); if you run a website and CloudFlare thinks your website is morally bad (likely because some people complained, otherwise there is no incentive to do anything), good luck defending yourself from DDoS attacks; if the Mastercard/VISA duopoly caves to public pressure and bans your organization you are basically done (even if what you're doing is completely legal).
They proactively shut the campaign down.
What, you would be fine if they just took the donated money and didn’t transmit it to the campaign operators? If their devops just ignored the campaign if there was any issue? And somehow they don’t need to handle support inquiries from happy (or unhappy) customers?
If you really think a business like kickstarter is all fixed costs and there is zero work for a marginal campaign, sounds like you’ve found a great business opportunity. VCs will beat your door down if you’ve found a model that scales with zero marginal cost and zero work for a new customer.
You don't have to put time and money and attention into things just to not ban them.
You ask the printing press to print pamphlets for your legal, peaceful and just protest. They say no, they'd rather not be involved in that sort of thing.
Do you still support this idea that businesses should make careful judgements about each client versus a general policy of neutrality?
You decide to print pamphlets for your protest after a colleague is fired when your boss/admin/whoever found out she had an abortion.
You ask the printing press to print pamphlets for your legal, peaceful and just protest. They say no, they'd rather not be involved in that sort of thing.
Do you still support this idea that businesses should make careful judgements about each client versus a general policy of neutrality?
Putting that aside, yes: Political speech shouldn't be compelled, any more than it should be constrained.
Now if you want to put some kind of further "common carrier"-style legal burden on printers (or kickstarter), then I think it's possible to make a case for it, but I'm not personally in favour. (On the other hand, in the UK we do exactly that with bank accounts - it's nearly impossible for a bank to turn away a new customer - so I guess there's a case for it in some circumstances). It's ultimately a question of regulation I guess.
I too prefer the days of neutrality and objectivity, a day when neutral platforms would act like neutral platforms.
What this is turning into is yet another case of tyranny by the moral majority.
Wherever there is power there will be assholes using it to control others.
When were those?
People don't realize that you want the filth out in the open, where it can be tracked. Deplatforming doesn't kill anything, it just sends it underground, furthering the cause for the various shadow systems that spring up from it.
Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-community level. It was never a free-for-all.
Forcing the shitty folks underground breaks the edgy-meme-to-radicalization pipeline quite effectively. I’ve greatly enjoyed not having to hear about Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopolis every day.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/deplatforming-works-this-n...
> But kicking Milo Yiannopoulos off Twitter didn’t make him stronger. It pushed him almost completely off the mainstream agenda. And part of the “fun” of being a Milo fan was precisely that prominence! You weren’t just listening to a random online crank; you were listening to an online crank who was very good at getting under prominent people’s skin. Lose that reach and some of the thrill is gone.
Yes it was, as once upon a time Reddit itself didn't take down a whole lot. If the mods of a given community didn't do what you think they are supposed to do then there were no real, enforced rules.
That is a distinction without a difference. Have you ever heard of violentacrez?
Sure, but the moderation team members have dramatically shifted from (and I’m being glib here) “kinda cringey atheist libertarians” to “authoritarian left/liberals steeped in idpol”.
The “Reddit moderator” cohort whiplashed from one extreme on the political compass to its polar opposite extreme in only a few years. Not claiming anything conspiratorial since I can certainly imagine how it could happen organically, but it’s interesting nonetheless how much of an effect different moderation standards can have on large online communities.
Hah. They permitted /r/n****** for years. Just about the only thing reddit would outright ban you for was illegal content, and maybe automated spamming.
You metaphorically decrease the number of people who might describe gay people with slurs while increasing the number who would shoot up a gay nightclub.
Lets try this: a KickStarter to raise money to lobby for making encryption illegal. And let's assume it's very successful and it raises tens of millions of dollars. How would you feel about that? Would you sign a petition requesting KickStarter drop it because it's against freedom of speech?
There are other, far more honorable, avenues to killing initiatives one doesn't like. What's to say I don't start a counter-lobbying campaign?
That so many embrace such a pathetic weapon as censorship speaks loudly about just how easily we sleepwalk into Orwellian society
I bet a lot of these folks would happily report their neighbors to the KGB or Stasi over falsehoods and bullshit, were this the appropriate era
The right to say “I disagree” and respond within the limits if the law is the other side of the free speech coin.
The first amendment gives Kickstarter the right to control what is on their private platform. There have never been “neutral platforms”. They’re a myth.
Kickstarter is doing what they think is best for them. Our legal and financial systems allow competitors to take advantage when miscalculations are made on the part of private parties.
Demanding “neutrality” on private platforms is a strictly anti-speech position.
Neutrality is a matter of opinion, hence the scare quotes. As soon as you compel someone to speak according to your definition of neutrality you violate their right to free expression.
Recently, I came to realize that this is exactly what I dislike about the arguments, ironically, against encryption, as well as for increasingly draconian anti-money laundering laws. I think that everyone, even the law makers, do know deep down that what they are doing is a compromise of strongly held and long-cherished ordeals. But pushed up against a wall and with the easiest path to progress from their own PoV being lawmaking, lobbyists, government, etc. delude themselves into thinking that this time it's different. This time, the ends do justify the means. And then in 50 years or so, we can all go "haha, how naive of them; of COURSE they don't!" while we're busy writing the next cycle of similar mistakes... Yada yada, history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes, etc.
On HN that would be speech against nuclear energy or against encryption.
Just like now KickStarter is under similar pressure.
I doubt Kickstarter or Gawker has crossed the line, but it is there to be crossed.
We will take your example, encryption.
Let’s say I strongly support encryption and I create a social media platform called Squibbit. Now, a group organizes on Squibbit calling for a ban on encryption.
One approach: I take it upon myself to organize another group on Squibbit using the platform the same way as everyone else (re: no special promotion, no admin only flagging, etc. just good old fashioned squibbling).
Compare this to another approach: I ban anyone who says they support a prohibition on encryption and use admin tools to promote voices in support of encryption.
Compare this to a final approach: the government decides it has a vested interest in encryption and wants to sway the voting population to support candidates who are pro-encryption. They ask Squibbit to ban all accounts opossing encryption and promote voices in support of encryption.
These three approaches are not the same. Do not conflate them.
You know, just like they did when it was revealed Microsoft and Google wanted to sign contracts with the US military.
But let's untangle something. There is a legitimate difference between this and ICE boycotts. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. are signing B2B contracts and making specific deals to work with the U.S. military or ICE or whatever group. This is not the same issue. It's similar, but different in very important ways.
One is the type of interaction. Business to business contracts are Not like using a platform as a user. A contract is a mutual agreement that is negotiated between two businesses. There are almost always dedicated employees whose responsibilities include dealing with a given contract, not to mention if there's any work to be done as a result of it. This is a very different interaction from merely being one of a million users on a public open-registration platform.
Two is who is protesting. I think some employee protests are silly, but not all of them. If employees don't want to work for a company that is doing what they believe to be unethical things, they are well within reason to threaten to leave the company.
I don't necessarily want to draw a direct conclusion about other similar events here, I'm just trying to point out that we're not dealing with the same kind of relationship.
I'm against banning entities from using e.g. Amazon Web Services, on the basis of their identity, if their usage is above board and legal. I'm not, however, talking about the concept of employees at Amazon not wanting to work for or with other entities directly.
The crucial thing though is to make sure that those other companies are in fact able to provide what Google and Microsoft won’t. For example, AWS is very happy to work with government, by offering not only the GovCloud region for regular gov work, but also AWS SC2S and C2S regions for Secret and Top Secret systems and data. This allows other companies to use their cloud infra to provide these defense services.
Imagine the alternative world where a most of the tech execs get to a shared conclusion that they do not want to contribute any of their services towards AI-powered military efforts. This is very much something that could conceivably happen. What then? Sure, if they get then steam-rolled by a peer superpower who doesn’t have such qualms about using AI to achieve their geopolitical goals, you can retort that they get what they asked for (of course, in our year of 2021, it is completely unimaginable that peer powers would ever dare to initiate military invasion, so this is obviously just a pure hypothetical). But is this what American people want?
Americans are, for better or worse, mostly in favor of US military, even at its stupidest (e.g. when it invades other countries that pose no risk to it under false pretenses). Should tech execs get then to decide the future of American people according to their own morality? Should the American people be able to force, through the overwhelming force of federal government, their own morality on individuals running their privately owned companies?
These are hard questions, and I don’t have an easy answer. What I know would help though is open and honest discussion, allowing people to win hearts and minds of others, and more mutual accommodation in the spirit of the famous quote attributed to Voltaire. This is very much not the direction lady 8 years have been pointing towards, though.
Do you actually believe 95% of HN (or a number even remotely close to that, let's say 50%) would want discussions against nuclear energy or encryption completely censored?
There's a huge difference between somebody saying "this is a stupid idea and we shouldn't even be discussing it" (I would say that) and wanting censorship actually enforced (I would never want that).
The toughest personal test to me was the protest against Cloudflare. I have a very personal reason to have sided with the protesters and petitioners, and honestly I had a hard time even trying to oppose it. In the end though, I just don't agree with it. The ends do not justify the means.
Even if the people you find to run the platform are completely amoral, these are also business questions. People have freedom of association, and they will use it. Businesses will too. If you want to run a "neutral and objective" hosting company that is happy to take the nazis and the spammers and the carders and the ddosers, you will quickly find yourself specializing in that market, because few others will choose to be associated with that.
I also didn't say it was "the people" boycotting Kickstarter, so I'm not sure if you're replying to the right comment.
The idea that platforms, all of them, need to enforce the day-to-day minutia of the chattering classes is ridiculous.
Platforms need to pick a few broad policies. "No porn" is a pretty good policy actually, and stick with it. And of course actually illegal things, "anything that is obviously illegal, or that we are told to take down with a warrant".
There is no such thing as a broad policy, not in practice. If you need to get a group of people to make consistent decisions about what porn is, and a much larger group of people to understand where the lines are and feel your judgments are fair, then you'll need extremely detailed polices.
It certainly used to be the case that DNS servers would happily resolve both stormfront and the workers party websites. Would be good to go back to that pre cancellation world.
And if you want to host the the nazis, nobody's stopping you but you. Most of us, though, don't think the world would be better if nazi propaganda were more easily available.
Makes virtually every group (including antifa and BLM ironically) a "nazi" group, rendering the term meaningless.
Regardless, your list of items help prove my point that there is no neutral. One can decide to platform or ban any or all of those things. Choosing to publish it all is no more neutral than banning it all.
> All this corporate activism is all fine and dandy when you agree with their politics. When you don't, they become the enemy.
The entire reason society works, or worked, is because people were willing to put aside their differences, regardless of how extreme, to engage in behaviors that were mutually beneficial. Start judging people based on adherence to your own politics and you'll find that, sooner or later, everybody will be your enemy.
As far as your second paragraph, in your framework society never really worked, which conveniently explains why there has always been war in some part of the world as far back as anyone can remember.
And there will always be war for the same reason there will always be murder. I would argue that rather than trying to frame a society around the concept of preventing war, it may be more pragmatic to try to minimize the impact of war such that otherwise minor conflicts between two nations don't end up dragging the entire world to war, for what is always framed as some greater good, but invariably just results in exponentially more death and destruction with far less than nothing to show for it.
I feel like we've recently witnessed this idea fail. I think "platform" under the current convention, is at odds with neutrality. You can't have a platform like Kickstarter without opinions about what can and can't be done on their site. They're not going to allow stuff they disagree with, stuff that will get them in trouble, etc.
Neutrality if that kind must be structured in one way or another. Platform plurality, with lots of options. Open protocols, FOSS. Something like ISP neutrality.
Platforms are judgemental by default.
Is it that other companies make it actually not financially survivable to rebuff the mobs? Or is it more a fear of labels and moderate cuts to bottom line. I'm sure they'd lose some money with controversy but would it really destroy them?
There are certain protections for certain groups (eg religion) but there aren't any laws compelling Kickstarter to allow porn projects. There aren't laws that compel YouTube to allow political content, medical content. There are no legal rights guaranteeing any of this.
Half the problem here is that people don't realise where the problem is. The rights established in the past don't take YouTube and Twitter into account.
If we want these rights, we'll have to establish them ourselves.
To me it isn't about whether or not platforms should do these things but if they should even be able to do them in the first place.
Should a small bank be obliged to provide payment processing for a supremacist website? Do they have the right to use the logo?
I'm not falling on one side or another. Simply pointing out what reality has been demonstrating strongly in recent years. These issues will come up. So will other, more commercially salient issues.
A service like Kickstarter just won't be neutral. There's no chance. Pressuring Kickstarter won't help. Want neutrality? It needs to be achieved by a different path.
I'm worried about AWS, and such. The current state of affairs is such that exclusion, censorship and such are inevitable.
Yes. That's the point of becoming a licensed type of entity. If you don't like it, remain private.
That lady didn't have to issue gay-marriages certificates, but if she didn't she wasn't going to keep her job at the state marriage office.
> A service like Kickstarter just won't be neutral
Sure, so they need to remain arms-length from government then.
> I'm worried about AWS, and such. The current state of affairs is such that exclusion, censorship and such are inevitable.
Yup.
Platforms overall don't take a stance for moral reasons but for perceived monetary reasons. If they believe they'll lose more money from users or advertisers leaving due to certain content than they gain from that content then they will get rid of that content. Whatever brings the most money will win in the end. Artists, as best I can tell, hate AI image models with a passion so presumably Kickstarter was afraid of losing a lot of campaigns from artists.
The CEO can have moral opinions or the board of directors might or Black Rock might or a large proportion of employees might. Any of these groups having a very strong opinion and the others not having one is sufficient.
Kickstarter has always been about getting money to artists to make stuff. They also happen to be synonymous with "crowdfunding" because they were the first to make it work, once that took off as a concept and KS to see a lot of gadget campaigns they started cracking down on those because that wasn't what the people running Kickstarter wanted to bring into the world. Eventually Kickstarter came to a point where they decided to make this explicit in the rules of the company, rather than become a heartless corporate machine motivated solely by whatever increases shareholder profit in the coming financial quarter:
"Kickstarter’s mission is to help bring creative projects to life. We measure our success as a company by how well we achieve that mission, not by the size of our profits. That’s why we reincorporated Kickstarter as a Benefit Corporation in 2015." - https://www.kickstarter.com/charter
Deciding to kill this campaign is right in line with point 1D of their charter: "Kickstarter will engage beyond its walls with the greater issues and conversations affecting artists and creators." And with 4a: "Kickstarter will always support, serve, and champion artists and creators, especially those working in less commercial areas." Kickstarter's a machine made to fill the gap in public art funding left by the gutting of the NEA, not an "objective and neutral platform" that will happily help you build obviously evil things as long as they get their cut of the money.
As a photographer, I disagree on all those fronts. As a photographer who likes to edit their photos with surrealist elements that can't be photographed - such as portals to another dimension, aliens, or anime characters - I'm doubly mad that the art I'm creating is suddenly not considered art because I'm using an AI to generate art instead of stealing the art.
In the digital mashup scene stealing art for digitally editing is quite common and nobody really bats an eye as long as the digital editing is 99% of the work. Copyright is constantly ignored by the scene for the last 20 or so years that I've been a part of it. (renders, C4Ds, fractals, stock photography, etc.) Think early 2000s forum signatures. Almost all of the graphic art from that era was made using stolen art to digitally mash together and few people cared it was violating copyrights to not use exclusively permissive CC licensed works.
pedants can piss on us and tell us that 'the molecular structure of piss and rain is basically the exact same thing why are you mad lmao' but the effects of this unapologetic data scraping are already becoming clear. professional artists are simply removing their works from the public facing web. communities based around collaboration and shared knowledge are darkening at an alarming rate.
If all they need is $25K, that's not going to be hard to get. There's sufficient demand for what they want to make that it will probably happen. Although we'll probably have to go through an era of bad porn being used to train systems to generate worse porn.
Pornhub has an AI unit. They're currently taking early out-of-copyright porn films and up-converting to 4K, a higher frame rate, and colorizing. As they point out, they have lots of training data for colorizing and body parts. With that working, they'll probably go on to content generation.
OpenAI's safety rails for chatGPT are super obnoxious. I was trying to generate D&D scenarios and have chatGPT act as NPCs. It worked really well unless anything even remotely related to violence was brought up (a character threatens another, a character draws a sword, etc). As soon as that happened, chatGPT would break character and give a canned lecture about why violence is never ok.
Anyway, ChatGPT was more than happy to kill off my characters when I asked it to. I didn't keep the transcript, but the words haunt me. "The small man walked away, not knowing if he was dead or just very badly injured." This was after the small man pulled out a handgun in the middle of a profanity-laden rant from the other character and shot him in the neck. Don't know why he aimed for the neck, but that's AI for ya.
IANAD but my general understanding of anatomy/physiology is that a solid neck wound is a pretty good way to off someone in a fairly certain way.
Admittedly many of the ends to it are agonizing... which says something else.
Write flavor text for my d&d game. <describe situation>.
Haven’t had to many issues with rails getting in my way yet. Any examples of your prompts that you were having issue with?
I’m finding ChatGPT to be so helpful as a lazy DM.
Look on the bright side. You're worried about setting a bad precedent, but the current trend in the top of the legal world is to ignore precedent, or hand-select the precedent you want. If this sort of thing becomes such a problem that action is needed, we can count on SCOTUS.
If the overton window shifts, and you and your ideas are being deplatformed using the same justifications you’ve championed, you’ll be screaming for a return to objectivity and neutrality.
Case in point:
You wouldn’t be arguing against objectivity and neutrality if doing so did not advance your own social and political power; you yourself have abandoned any pretense of aspiring to either.
This makes you a self-serving person to whom it would be dangerous to grant power.
Anyone who claims to be "neutral" is in fact declaring their own apathy towards a topic, and when that topic is "should a specific group of people have civil rights" then neutrality is ethically disgusting. I'm personally apathetic regarding whether some money-collecting company wants to work for AI people, so I don't really care about Kickstarter's policy here, and I don't foresee myself caring in the future. Pretending that Kickstarter is a power broker of some kind is in my estimation some serious Chicken Little territory.
"Aspiring" to either objectivity or neutrality is not the same thing as actually manifesting either quality, and such aspirations generally involve disclosing conflicts of interest or other biases, which are things every living person has. Wrapping either concept in other weasel words doesn't really move the needle.
I find your position to be the one that's "ethically disgusting", completely without principal beyond your self-serving aims, and corrosive to a healthy society.
At least Unstable Diffusion isn’t predominantly used for the same fantasy/illustrations that people love to generate on the other services.
I don't agree with them, but I don't think its fair to say there hasn't been pushback on the other projects you mentioned.
It's also worth noting that producing new art is only a subset of possible use cases. So how should we treat new and novel photo-realistic images? Is that infringement too?
Of course, if it didn't exist, I wouldn't be buying art from artists instead. I'd simply go back to my stories not being illustrated at all. So from my perspective, this story is all about artists wanting to tear the ability out of my hands.
You aren't exactly making a convincing argument saying that you don't have to pay an artist this way.
And honestly if you don't think this style of low effort content creation isn't coming for books...
I am sorry for artists and think we should probably have a subsidy for human creativity. But for me, Twitter’s bad-faith arguments about “stealing” or “copyright violation”, and maximalist demands for bans on AI art, make compromise undesirable and probably impossible.
Unless you are a lawyer you are just pulling reasoning out of thin air. All aspects of Copyright with human's have been decided by decades of court cases. Assuming you understand the underlying theory enough to guess how a court case would go is presumptuous.
> Ethically, our society accepts legally automating people out of jobs
And society accepts paying people for their work.
> There are winners and losers, that’s capitalism, for better or worse.
Capitalism is all about avoiding paying for what you did in order to artificially increase your profits, I agree there.
> I am sorry for artists and think we should probably have a subsidy for human creativity
I mean if the AI models just... Trained on purchased or free materials there wouldn't be a problem.
Other media figured out how to handle when a "purchase" isn't a purchase in the traditional fashion: see streaming services.
AI art is just the latest version of piracy. "It is just bytes" yet again.
They're not copying, they're doing the equivalent of looking at thousands of paintings and from that figuring out what paintings are supposed to look like. If you were asked to draw something in the style of Picasso and did so, would your new art work be a copyright violation?
Is every painting you've ever seen public domain? Have you ever got an idea or influence from a non public domain artwork?
Is lossly encoding generative or copyright violation? Let’s say you encode a bunch of copyright images as lossy jpegs, specifically? Most people would say “copyright infringement“.
Now, if I have an encrypted zip file, random binary blob… but with a pass phrase, it decodes to a bunch of copyright images. Still copyright infringement right?
Now, if I have an AI compression algorithm where the model that rebuilds the content of the archive is a local binary blob, and all you transmit is the pass phrase, it’s still copyright infringement right?
Even though, you’re actually not sharing the content of the archive, you’re just sharing the pass phrase and the AI is rebuilding it from that pass phrase.
So, 1) when you rebuild a binary distinct output that sufficiently closely resembles the input, 2) regardless of the manner in which you are doing it, technically, it’s copyright infringement.
Now, this is where your argument fails.
…because your argument is that the technical means by which the content is “generated” inherently makes the content distinct and not copyright infringement.
However, “generation” and “decompression” are the same thing; the technical means by which the output is generated is irrelevant.
The difference is that in this case, the output is sufficiently distinct that you could reasonably argue that it is different from the training data. That’s a fair argument!
…buuuut, here’s the thing: if your model can generate outputs that are copyright infringement because they are similar but not binary identical to existing specific copyrighted works… then what you have “effectively” is a giant compressed archive that has both copyright and non-copyright work in it.
That’s problematic.
I am not misunderstanding how the models work; I’ve built models like this, and yes, there’s no “copy of the image” in the checkpoint file… just like an encrypted zip file doesn’t have a “copy of the image” in it until you apply the correct decompression and decryption algorithm, it’s just a blob with high entropy.
> Have you ever got an idea or influence from a non public domain artwork?
That is fundamentally not the issue here.
The issue is that the model checkpoint file contains a combination of data and algorithm that can rebuild both novel and copyrighted work.
If a zip file with both copyright and non copyright work in it is infringement, so is this.
Ie. tldr: yes, it’s complicated, but this “this comes from ignorance about how they work” BS that is floating around the SD community is both dishonest, and lacks itself an understanding of how the models work. It’s a pretty ironic thing to say really. The right prompt can generate copyrighted content. That how the models were trained. Not binary identical, but as we’ve already established, that’s not necessary condition for copyright infringement, or like every lossy image format would be free game.
…and yes, I get it, if someone invented a purely algorithmic decompression algorithm that could take “source code for MS Word” and generate exactly that as the output, then I’m arguing it would be infringing. Yup. …because the only way you could create that algorithm would be to encode the original source code into it.
So your argument rests on a premise that, as far as I can tell, isn't true. What prompts did you give to what ML model that gave you something copyrighted?
Because I just tried a whole bunch of different prompts to make the bloody Mona Lisa with no luck.
You can.
Diffusion models do this:
- prompt -> vae -> latent -> diffusion -> latent -> vae -> image
Or, for image-to-image:
- image -> vae -> latent
- prompt -> vae -> latent -> mix image latent + diffusion -> latent -> vae -> image
Try image-to-image on the source image with a low strength. Can it regenerate the image? If the answer is yes, then there is categorically some latent that maps to the output. i.e. It is technically possible to generate the image from the model.
The question is, how would you generate that latent from a prompt?
You do it like this:
1) Pick an image you want to find, eg. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Zl6Zx
2) Do a reverse image search to find a suitable prompt, from: https://huggingface.co/spaces/pharma/CLIP-Interrogator
In this case, it's:
> a painting of a woman with blue eyes, by Aleksi Briclot, trending on Artstation, ghostly necromancer, red haired young woman, downward gaze, the blacksmits’ daughter, her gaze is downcast, dressed in a medieval lacy, gothic influence, screenshot from the game, from netflix's arcane, high priestess
3) Search the laion database for that prompt and see if it was part of the training data: https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval
(Yes, it is: in this case, the top hit is a match score of 0.3968).
4) Crack open stable diffusion.
Put the cfg scale up (do not allow variation) and pick a some step value that generates reasonably accurate images. Maybe like k_euler, 50 steps, cfg scale 30, 512x768.
You're now generating images that are 'nearby' in the latent to the target; now its just pissing around in the seed and with variations to narrow the gap.
> So your argument rests on a premise that, as far as I can tell, isn't true.
...but the point I'm making is that it is a) possible, and b) plausible, if you can be bothered doing a seed search. Can you be bothered? I can't be bothered.
Like... I mean, dude, the model was trained to be able to do this. That's literally what it's supposed to do. The VAE can map a latent to real existing images trivially (that's what it literally does when you use image-to-image). The latent space is a 64x64x4 vector that you're moving through with your prompt in 'latent space'.
Look, I get it, the chances are you picking the exact seed that generates this exact image are pretty slim right? 64x64x4 is a massive fucking number, and the chances of stumbling on exactly the right seed is like winning the lottery right?
...but that would only be true if you were RANDOMLY moving through the latent space, and you're not. You're specifically homing in on 'good' latent space values around real images using your prompt. That means that the chance of the latent you pick being a real picture is not 1/64x64x4... it's actually plausibly higher.
There is a non-zero chance that any generated output is actually a real image.
So, back so our original quesiton:
Is sharing a magic seed (123123123 or whatever) the same as sharing a password to an encrypted zip file?
...because that's what it comes down to.
You have:
- (algorithm) that takes (pass phrase) and generates (output).
- If you can provide (pass phrase) and generate (output) that is copyrighted content, then is (algorithm) infringing?
- The answer applies the same way to encrypted zip files and to AI models.
So... you gotta pick which way you wanna roll with it, but you can't have one or the other. You get both, with the same rules.
That's the problem.
sorry if anyone is disabled and i hope they're able to get the support they need, but equating DIY with ableism only makes sense if your disability is "lazy and kind of a moron." and to be fair, i know plenty of people that suffer from this chronic condition, their art is pretty unnecessary, and they're often trying to ally themselves with whichever new protected class in order to garner kudos in ways other than being remarkable on their own merits.
i love this dumb premise, though. i'm going to continue thinking about it. damn, "thinking," how ableist of me... there are people in comas who can't think!
unironically skill issue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDLoleIfAro
not to mention the blatant disregard for the many disabled people who rely on art as our only means to make a living. i've seen far too many singularity nutcases saying artists are regressive luddites who should be crushed under the noble wheel of progress from once side of their mouth while crying about gatekeeping and '''ableism''' from the other.
And no, it's not infringement if you work in someone's style - but it's also not professional to do this for too long, especially with a living artist. One piece in someone else's style is a homage, several years of pieces in their style starts to get you labeled a "clone" or a "style thief". Unless you are their assistant, in which case "working in their style" is exactly what you are being paid to do.
If you would like an example of this happening, read the 'controversy' section of Kieth Giffen's Wikipedia page, which sketches out the way fans and fellow artists took Kieth Giffen to task for doing a complete style swipe from José Muñoz' shadow-drenched crime comics for several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy
this would be the ideal
In this case, it's a labor that's already a way to barely scrape by for a lot of its practitioners.
This is the difference. Is this what you are cheering for? Is this the world you want?
I think there are many sides to this issue and artists shouldn’t care keep their industry.
Artists will decry AI art for a few more months / years, then dust will settle, and we will still have ever-improving diffusion (or whatever the next iteration is) models. Slowly, people will realize that artists learn and copy from other artists much in the same way that current ML models do. Education about how these models work will improve, and the current mythology of "it's blatantly copy/pasting!" will subside, for the most part.
We'll start to see a counter-protest against anti-AI artists who use tools like Photoshop or other digital tools, most of which have involved some amount of machine learning (e.g. the "heal brush" or "context aware fill") for a long time.
AI art will start passing the "art turing test" at higher rates, and people will realize that whatever intrinsic spark / soul / whatever there is to art is mainly attributed to a narrative or story about the artist that exists outside of the canvas - and that the actual artistic contents of what lives on the canvas itself doesn't depend on a living, breathing thing if you make up a compelling narrative to support it.
Artists displaced by this new ease of generating art will find new economic niches, and life will continue on.
In the context of HN, it would be interesting to see how unstable diffusion will change the porn industry. I imagine anyone could contribute to the industry, if they want, modifying their identities. I think it was Axel Kuschevatzky [1] who said that the porn movie industry is the most conservative. Playing the same short scripts all the time.
https://equilibriumai.com/index.html
It's already up to the original amount that they intended to raise on Kickstarter. I have a feeling that all this negativity is just going to amplify the Streisand effect.
Kickstarter can now safely say, “our brand is not associated with this porn generator”.
…and, in the end the unstable folk got the money they wanted anyway?
Isn't this a victory for everyone?
Seems like a fuss about nothing to me.
Freedom of association; don’t like what they’re doing? Don’t be involved with it.
If that's the case, it would be interesting to see what happens if the AI purposefully isn't trained on art in some part of the style latent space, and to see if it's able to still generate art in that style.
Taking this to a possible extreme, what if we trained it only on classical art work, would it be possible to get it to extrapolate to more modern styles, or to fine tune it with only a small number of, potentially, as people are calling for, paid samples?
and merry christmas
The ease of it matters.
It’s ok to look in shop windows, therefore it’s ok to look in any window, therefore it’s ok to use ultra telephoto lenses to photograph naked people in their homes.
It’s hypocritical to ban fully automatic machine guns if you don’t also ban pillows, because both can be used to kill people.
And so on. There is a whole personality type that seems to be based on holding views that depend on ignoring all context in order to produce absurd results while claiming to be highly principled.
Not really anybody wants to be "First Amendment auditors" or the guy in Warren v Brandenburg, but they forced the issue to establish/discover limits.
If what was legal was simply "what is average/normal/reasonable" then that likely would mean much less freedom.
You can also be influenced socially through media (etc) either direction over time to change what the definition of "reasonable" is. Remember that Barack Obama ran on the now "extreme" position (that many non-Western countries like Japan still holds) that marriage is between a man and a woman only, a little more than a decade ago. Conversely, gay marriage was "extreme"/fringe back then.
Using a telephoto to peer into someones window is also illegal as they typically have an expectation of privacy.
Photoshopping a movie stars face onto a nude body has been around a long time and much of the fake porn of famous people was done this way, probably mostly by individuals. Please give it a google if you doubt me, at your own risk.
In the US, in NY at least, they do not. A case about exactly this (telephoto lens photography through someone else's window, later displayed as art) didn't survive a motion to dismiss. This was upheld on appeal. Foster v Svenson (2015).
That very much depends on where you are. In US, they're not banned in most states, although they're quite expensive to get, and there's a lot more paperwork than usual.
Can we both agree that you should be able to purchase a kitchen knife without a special license? (in parts of China, you can't). Do we both agree that allowing people to have personal nuclear weapons is probably a bad idea and shouldn't be legal?
If we can agree on those two things, we're actually on the same side of the argument. The only difference is where we draw the line. I might draw it at "you can buy a sword but not a gun" - you might draw it at "you can buy a gun but not a bazooka". But we both realise that some things can be given to people and handled responsibly (like a simple knife) but other things can't (like large amounts of explosives)
Occasionally you'll meet a person that says "no I think people should be allowed to have nukes" or "no, we should ban all sharp objects" in which case you can dismiss a whole like of reasoning, i.e. arguing where to draw the line, because the person's made it clear there is no bounded limit, and they are not open to debating that.
Other examples of scales where, if you can't establish boundaries, there is no point debating that person;
- can we forgive a child for accidentally killing a small animal? If so, can we forgive Hitler for genocide?
- can I draw a caricature of a famous person? If so, can I make deepfake porn featuring my neighbour?
- can I push a burglar out of my house when he breaks in? If so, can I execute anyone who enters my property?
I’m also reminded of the old “would you sleep with me for $1m” joke: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/
For the porn example: Is it because one is often thought to be completely accurate, causing a distorted/wrong view of the world? Is it speed of creation? Is it how easily people can learn to do it? Is it automatability? Is it fine detail and accuracy?
https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-techno...