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Comment by pizza | Hacker News Reader

Wow!

for context: AUTOMATIC1111 created and maintains (maintained?) an extremely popular and active web ui for stable diffusion. Beast-mode maintainer.

Even after the debacle w stability.ai (who, to their great credit, I believe, normalized discord chatroom relations rapidly), that’s a string of bad luck for this community keystone of the nascent txt2img technological tranche.

Whatever the eventual steady state of this matter, I hope this person isn’t burning out in the process.

    “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer // The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…”

and all that jazz..

Lurking GitHub employees.. give us the verdict..!

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Looking at the Reddit thread about this, there was some arguably racist stuff going on in his repo which could've been related to this suspension. I'm not sure whether this is the right way to handle such things (banning those specific repo's might be better), but it would be somewhat understandable.

> Looking at the Reddit thread about this, there was some arguably racist stuff going on in his repo

That may or may have been warranted but these days "some arguably racist stuff" is a too vague description to be meaningful to act on, or pass judgement by on its own.

Do you have the link to the relevant reddit-thread for better context?

It's been pasted multiple times in the comments, but here it is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103upr6/co...

If it was just one of those examples, sure. But there are multiple things that are 'arguably racist' combined with apparent activity on 4chan, I'd say it doesn't seem just coincidental.

We don't know whether this has anything to do with the suspension though, everything that's being written is all just theories.

There is about 42% of population which do not support George Floyd protests. White mode is also not really racist: at least it is less racists than certain members of US government.

However, he is based in Russia and that changes everything.

I saw this response debunking the whole mod accusation:

https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103vsm2/we...

As for 4chan activity, how on earth can anything there be attributed to anyone ? It's a anonymous messaging board. I can go there and claim that I'm the prince of Wales and start making egregious statements.

Someone can plant racist information anywhere and wait for the ban hammer then?

The racist "information" in this case was produced by the maintainer of the project themself though.

Did he add the 'n' tag or did he just accept a PR with changes made to artists.csv ?

That's quite a important distinction.

As for the mods, I have no problem with those, he made the WhiteOnly mod as a response to existing mods which removed white people, and I can't argue against the George Floyd riots being anything but peaceful.

The very first version of this file, authored by him, already included the 'n', only on artists that are either black or draw black people in art.

But sure, look at the guy that has dozens of red flags that all scream white supremacy and brush it off with "lol george floyd protests were violent tho".

Did he create the artists.csv file himself, or did he copy it from somewhere ?

This eagerness to attribute racism and 'white supremacy' to people has made the accusation pointless IMO.

I think the BlackLivesMatter movement was a big scam that fueled riots which cost people lives and a ton of economic damage while riding on a wave of legitimate but overblown criticism of police violence. Am I a white supremacist now ?

Was reading the Reddit thread and noticed this was said about the 'n' tag:

>Out of 3041 artists in the file 16 of them are tagged as 'n', and a further 8 >tagged as 'c' (no idea what it means either).

> Alain Laboile,0.67634284,c > Julie Blackmon,0.72862685,c > William-Adolphe Bouguereau,0.618265,c > Bapu,0.6122084,c > Robert Irwin,0.58078,c > Cassius Marcellus Coolidge,0.5805516,c > Dr. Seuss,0.5597466,c > Henning Jakob Henrik Lund,0.5147134,c

Another uses also wrote:

>I don’t think they marked black artists with an n as you seem to be claiming. >There are also white artists marked with a c, like Julie Blackmon. Also I found >a german white artist Mati Klarwein who has an n in the dataset.

I can't say for sure where they got the data from, but the initial commit of the file, including all the categories, was by them[1].

I'm not even saying a ban was necessary in this case, just that the question is not about someone else implanting data, but the repository owner themselves.

Apart from that I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the author had racist intentions in their GitHub activity too. At least when it comes to their Steam activity there are indications that range from dubious to extremely clear racism. First of all there is the "White Only" mod for RimWorld[2], which seems a bit unsavory, but who knows. Then the question of why the "Black Only" mod[3] has an image of a black person with a spear in the African Savannah, whereas the "White Only" one has a group of white people standing happily on a planet in modern clothing. (The "Yellow Only" mod[4] has an image of Emperor Taishō)

Most condemning in my eyes is the fact that their Steam profile[5] shows that at some point their nickname was "Remember the six gorillion" (click on the little arrow next to their current name to see previous iterations). This is clearly an anti-Semitic, or at least Holocaust-denying reference.[6]

[1]https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/comm...

[2]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=15187...

[3]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=15188...

[4]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=15205...

[5]https://steamcommunity.com/id/no-sry

[6]https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/six-gorillion

What do you mean by 'planting racist information' exactly?

This plays into the hands of trolls. See YouTube, where people snipe each other with automated dmca takedowns.

If MS doesn’t set up tribunals for these types of things, it will just be abused to take down stuff.

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