Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping | Hacker News Reader

Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

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Everyone is crying Corporate Greed in here. And, I can understand why. But, here’s another perspective based on listening to David Holz answer all kinds of questions from random users for four hours a week for over a year during Midjourney’s “Office Hours”.

AFAICT, Midjourney has no shareholders and David Holz is the farthest thing from a slick CEO. He’s a big dreamer hippie dork. He made all the money he cares to have from the sale of his previous company and now just wants to work on fun research projects. The goal of Midjourney is to bring creative power to as many people as possible.

Whenever politics or other controversial topics come up, the MJ teams tries to stay out of it. They just want a welcoming space for all sorts of people to collaborate and create. Lots of people complain that they don’t allow porn. But, as a result, a millions of people who are not just horny teenage boys enjoy hanging out on the server sharing and discussing art that is not just pics of sexy women all day every day. Looking at you, unending parade of unfathomly huge boobs on https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=%23StableDiffusion

David seems to think that since ridiculing politicians in China is taboo, having people ridicule Xi on MJ would make it unwelcoming to people in China. He wants them to feel comfortable collaborating with people all over the world on MJ. So, prompting Xi is blocked. That’s all there is to it.

> David seems to think that since ridiculing politicians in China is taboo, having people ridicule Xi on MJ would make it unwelcoming to people in China.

It's taboo because a dictator forbids it. The people have nothing to do with it

Being banned would make it quite unwelcome

Being banned could give it subversive allure

Similar would also be illegal in Thailand under Lèse-majesté. Political satire of the old King in particular would be unwelcoming to many Thais which held him in an esteem above such things.

Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it wouldn't also be culturally unacceptable and alienating.

The difference between the king of Thailand and Xi Jinping is that the former is basically a cultural institution, while the latter is a political figure who uses repression and censorship to consolidate power. Xi's power grab is not part of some Chinese cherished cultural tradition - it's just a power grab, and probably viewed as such even within the party.

I'm aware of the differences. I just wanted to provide an example of censorship that is more aligned with cultural values to provide a counter-example to the thread that violating such laws can never be exclusionary.

There are are similar laws that involve depictions of The Buddha, monks etc here that would fall into the same category. I imagine this is less contentious for Western observers because religion is often a protected class in Western nations too.

The idea of the head of state being immune to criticism however hits a political sore spot however and triggers these sorts of standoff views.

I just feel this sort of nuance is lost on primarily American audiences. The world isn't homogenous and at least here in Thailand values are significantly different for better or worse.

Here’s the difference: is Holz banning the production of images of the King?

> can never be exclusionary

I think this isn't quite the right word. "Off-putting", perhaps? It doesn't exclude anyone.

> I just feel this sort of nuance is lost on primarily American audiences. The world isn't homogenous and at least here in Thailand values are significantly different for better or worse.

So why not reduce functionality in the foreign versions and allow the rest of the world to have this functionality?

I think it depends on if the output space is shared.

In the case of MidJourney the output is in Discord for all to see. Setting community standards like no-porn is about creating a space where the most possible people will feel welcome. I would like to think a policy of "no disrespectful imagery" of legally-protected deities or figures wouldn't be that burdensome as a whole. It also helps to avoid drama. There is probably places that such drama would be a welcome addition but I get the feeling MidJourney is not one of those places.

I'm not saying we should bake such constraints into the models, that I think is in poor taste and unnecessary. If people can run the model on their own machine where the output is private to them they should be allowed to generate whatever they want and they can post that in venues where that sort of content is acceptable.

But when images are emitted into a public shared space I do think some rules on what is and isn't appropriate are fair game. At the end of the day it's meant to be an AI art community that is about the fusion of technology and creativity. It's not setup to be a place for political discourse.

Discord is banned in China. If any Chinese who agree with Chinese law are on Discord they are violated said law. So no, not this.

>"he former is basically a cultural institution"

Cultural my ass. It is as political as it gets. Just do a search on Lèse-majesté in Thailand. Here is one from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Thai...

calling a political figure a "cultural tradition" sounds like a flimsy excuse to try to short-circuit any political debate about a monarch. makes me wanna start whistling yankee doodle...

Most Thais would quite happily satirize the current King, whose antics really satirize themselves (see below), but they can't because they would end up in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fufu_(dog)

I know, which is why I specifically said the old King. The two rulers are viewed very differently in Thailand but the laws apply equally to both.

Bowing to foreign authoritarian censorship is okay if it’s done for a rich man’s convenience? What a shitshow begging for regulation.

Not ridiculing xi is the regulation

Indeed. Regulation isn't a magical well-intentioned, well-executed, well-self-policed endeavour. It's incredibly varied, and has few genuine incentives to improve on any of those axes.

So it just happens that hippy values and western greed kowtowing to authoritarian regime values purely for the sake of money happen to be exactly the same thing. A story too convenient for my taste but everyone is free to believe whatever they want.

What would you do?

Remember, there’s really only two options: run a service in a country and abide by the law and norms of that country, or don’t run a service in that country (ie IP geoblock the entire place).

I mean, sure, you can run a service that abides by the law but not the norms (eg Onlyfans is available in the US despite the US being a country founded by prudes), but it’s hard and you need your full focus to get it just right. And, worse yet, in China the border between law and norms is notoriously blurred.

I’m for freedom of speech and against Chairman Xi, but I can’t really fault the Midjourney team for choosing to operate in China regardless. It’s a hard choice and there are no right answers.

I could have a set of values I believe in and not run my service in countries that violate my values. Seems pretty simple.

Not simple if you want to make money from a huge percentage of people in China.

Also, it seems like the principle of giving into bullies isn’t just an immediate decision but a precedent for future decisions where the rule is to capitulate to authoritarian regime demands.

>"the rule is to capitulate to authoritarian regime demands"

Western countries impose a crapload not so freedom loving laws / rulse / behavior / etc as well. Do you propose shutting down business in the West as well? Or you have a rule that says kill no more people than X or do not kill people in country Y and you're ethical?

Certainly if a western country demanded I kill people with my product, I would refuse.

I don’t propose limiting use in China because they are jerks. I just propose not accepting their bullying demands to change my product.

> drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,

https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762

The difference is that drunk driving objectively kills over ten thousand people every year. Meanwhile, the negative effects of 10 person company refusing to generate low-effort satire is less clear.

Bending the knee to a brutal ethnic cleansing regime is never a positive, regardless of the size of the entity capitulating.

At the end of the day, it's his company, so he can choose what services to supply. Freedom of speech means that he is allowed to have is own worldview that you disagree with, and you're free to use any other AI tools to make as much satire as you wish. If you're worried about China, worry about our incompetent Congress who is more interested in collecting sound bites than actually learn enough about technology to write meaningful regulation that protects us from China's influence on corporations.

Yes. No one doubts who's company it is. That does not make their actions free from criticism.

They're free to do what they want, others are free to say what they want to say (well, except when using Midjourney), the company can listen or not, and people can use Midjourney or not.

Saying "if you don't like it, shut up and find something else" doesn't seem particularly productive.

i mean no there's obviously a 3rd option. run the service anyway and don't geoblock. like the banning country might block your service but that's on them.

if i'm running something not illegal and some other country bans it i see no moral case for me doing work to enforce some foreign government's laws for them. i'm not magically "operating" in every country around the world just because someone from there pings my server.

Just to clarify, puritans were involved in the founding of the USA, but much of the country was not based on prudish norms

If you want to operate in that country and accept all of the downsides there's nothing preventing you from offering China an inferior version of your product, as many companies already do. That they're going to force feed the rest of the world this authoritarian, fascist, shit is downright deplorable and worthy of condemnation.

The right answer is not to operate your business in totalitarian states no matter how much you want to be rich.

China's legal system doesn't run on rule of law, it runs on threat of rule by law. In this case, it means anyone who wants to function in china must predict what the government will dislike, since there is no actual Chinese law against making fun of Xi Jinping (but they will shut you down anyways if you allow it).

Sure, if they want to operate in China they are taking the best course of action, but it will hardly be enough since it is an user produced content system.

There is a third and a fourth option.

3. Split the platform/user-base. Allow freedom of expression in western countries and censor it in China.

4. Censor prompts and images only in China, which still allows sharing non-political artwork between Chinese and western user.

All other platforms operating in China (of Chinese or western origin) have to do the same.

An authoritarian regime which takes people out of poverty instead of killing them or putting them in jails, what a joke!

Oh wait, is this the propaganda talking?

Yep. Midjourney is the exact reason why projects like Stable Diffusion are so important, anime distractions or not.

Not so simple. No ridiculing Xi makes the platform less comfortable for people in other countries like the US. We expect freedom to ridicule and if that’s not available on a platform because the owner prefers to cater to a specific dictator, then we may be less likely to use it. I might still use it , I might not.

But bowing to a dictator who says you can’t say Winnie the Pooh anymore seems like a one-sided, pro-dictator decision.

It has nothing to do with the CEO wanting to make people in China comfortable - surely he wants people in the US to feel comfortable too if that was the case?

I suppose you can’t have both. So siding with the dictator was the choice made? Bold move cotton.

People in the US are plenty used to rules forbidding certain speech on basically every platform that I'm aware of. Slurs, personal attacks, politics, excess profanity, drug discussions, sexual discussions, excess arguing, etc, are all things that are frequently banned or discouraged in many communities.

> in other countries like the US. We expect freedom to ridicule

God forbid y’all see a nipple in a non-sexual context though :D

> Lots of people complain that they don’t allow porn. But, as a result, a millions of people who are not just horny teenage boys enjoy hanging out on the server sharing and discussing art that is not just pics of sexy women all day every day.

I don't think that follows - boobs being allowed doesn't stop people from creating SFW works as well.

It kinda does? Enabling NSFW would discourage a lot of people from using the server if they have to keep looking over their shoulder or only use it in private

Reddit, Tumblr, Imgur, and literally every other social network that allows NSFW content are frequently used in public, at work, etc.

Who downvotes the above? It's obvious allowing NSFW content is not a problem if you simply separate NSFW from SFW content. This "problem" of NSFW content seems so artificial to me, it has been solved decades ago.

Yes, and it's a FUDish distraction from the main point of political free expression.

Midjourney is supposed to be used collaboratively in the open. I understand the first thing people need to use new tech for is always porn, but can you just wait? Not everyone is so eager to get to that future.

It's becoming difficult to find good content among the tons of waifu with various degrees of anatomy realism. The most popular stable diffusion resources website is a mess right now: https://civitai.com

You can just filter out anime in account settings.

I may have to create an account, but it should have some weights by default.

Thanks for adding more context, but I think your framing of the motivation makes the situation far worse.

"...That’s all there is to it."

Regardless of motivation, bowing to authoritarian control is still bowing to authoritarian control.

I would claim it's worse to censor ridiculing political figures out of politeness than out of profit seeking.

Self censorship is one of the main methods by which authoritarian ideologies are maintained and spread. It's not secret police knocking on peoples doors. It's people thinking in their head "I want to remain polite...".

I respect the intent to create forums for global collaboration. But this really is one of the areas where this is helping to spread the authoritarian ideology.

Is the genocide in Xinjiang one of the impolite topics?

What if China invades Taiwan, and the Taiwan war becomes one of the "impolite" topics for Chinese?

> Looking at you, unending parade of unfathomly huge boobs on ...

Holy shit you weren't kidding.

Lol. I clicked on the link, thinking "Oh come on, it can't be THAT bad", and was presented with a literal endless gallery of slightly Manga-ish women with unfathomably huge boobs. Maybe, instead of turning the whole world into paperclips, the AI apocalypse will consist of the filling of every last speck of hard disk storage space with a trillion boringly similar synthetic jpegs of such charming ladies.

Such innocent hashtag as well, #StableDiffusion. Don't even need to clear the browsing history.

I recently got into CNC machining, so tried searching twitter to find some accounts to follow. boy was i surprised by that #cnc hashtag.

I just tried search for #cnc and mostly got machining content, with bits of non-English stuff I don't understand but looked innocent enough. What sort of content did you see?

They probably applied an NSFW filter since :)

Presumably this: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=CNC

Searching for coverage by the British Broadcasting Company on Twitter is kind of a pain.

I don't know if it's still the case but the default state of stable diffusion when creating women was to create huge boobs. Also all the men and women were lookalike with some difference like hair colors and skin colors (but it may well have improved a lot since)

Same here.

Although you say "slightly Manga-ish" women - I saw some quite realistic photos.

Your comment was posted 22 hours ago though. It's possible that the models (pun unintended) have gotten even better since you last looked.

Is there an actual source for that or are you just here to complain about Stable Diffusion users flooding your Twitter with AI waifus?

If David is such a "big dreamer hippie dork," he should: 1. either open source the model or at least make it cheaper ($8/month for just 200 images is ridiculous) and 2. not bow down to dictators, or just stay out of political subjects completely.

I agree with 1. but how can you ever hope to achieve 2?

Generating realistic images is a powerful tool, that is used for political reasons already, so politicians will get involved. So it is a hard question, but I hope if I am in such a position, I will not preemptively try to please the winni puhs.

One solution would probably be, to not allow generating pictures with real persons at all. Whether they are Trump or Xi.

I dunno, you can generate as many images as you want in slow mode right?

I believe relaxed mode requires the standard tier, which is $30 at monthly rates.

4 cents an image is ridiculous?

It's 200 fast mode images and an unlimited number of images in relax mode, which is only slightly slower.

You do not get unlim relax mode on the cheapest plan, only standard or pro, which is 3x the cost.

I can sympathize.

It can be personal too, and I wouldn't blame him. Getting denied a Visa to China would be the the easiest problem. The worst would be getting arrested (Chinese friendly airport), possibly extradited because you ran a satire generation service?

If he just wants satire and his goals aren't to fight political battles, this stance makes perfect sense. I'd like to be able to visit China without fear, too. Even simply transiting would bring up anxiety.

It really perplexes me that there isn't any Internet Outrage about fetishisation of young Japanese girls; cartoons or otherwise.

As far as I can see it's the one area of DEI that gets a free pass.

It's really creepy.

what does anime waitfus have to do with DEI?

There's no DEI initiative to help the disadvantaged weeaboos

They’ll be adding ‘minor attracted persons’ to the kiriarchy rubric any day now…

You occasionally see some discourse, but generally that's fairly far down the list of priorities of Asian or Asian-American women themselves. There was more discourse in the Anglosphere about the anti-Asian mass shootings. Tends to get subsumed into generic pro/anti porn discourse. I suspect the discourse from Japanese women themselves is conducted in Japanese and therefore invisible to us.

I don't think in a professional DEI environment you'd get a pass for having a fetishy anime desktop background.

I’ve heard generative porns don’t seem to be as popular in Japanese male/boys market(for-women categories). Nor cats, strangely, considering the Internet is supposed to be obsessed with cute cats doing cute things.

The internet was invented for cats and pictures of them. I don't understand why everyone doesn't know this.

My point is, if same applied for AI, there should be cargo ships worth of generated cats - but no, all generative image AI is used for is to generate young (anime) Japanese girls, and absolutely nothing else. Which is okay for me, but curious.

Not all anime girls are Japanese. Almost all the generated ones don't even have a nation of origin.

Tells you something about the seriousness about the whole DEI thing.

> Whenever politics or other controversial topics come up, the MJ teams tries to stay out of it

> [...]

> So, [ridiculing] Xi is blocked

These two points are not congruent.

People keep talking about "AI alignment" when they haven't solved the "CEO alignment" problem, or the question "alignment with what, exactly?"

> The goal of Midjourney is to bring creative power to as many people as possible.

AI is unarguably powerful, even if we're still struggling to quantify that in terms of how "intelligent" it is, to what extent it's plagiarism, or reliability, etc. The consequence of power is necessarily interacting with real-world political power structures. There is no "neutral" option; AI will empower some and disempower others, who are going to object to that. As we're seeing in this thread, if you empower or disempower one side of a political dispute (making Xi art or not), there's going to be one side that gets mad at you.

Make cultural products, get culture war.

I do wonder if this is going to be regarded as the "Thomas Midgely" era of AI, where scientists from the 2050s struggle with the legacy of widespread AI "contamination" of everything in the data record by people who didn't acknowledge downsides.

>David seems to think that since ridiculing politicians in China is taboo, having people ridicule Xi on MJ would make it unwelcoming to people in China. He wants them to feel comfortable collaborating with people all over the world on MJ. So, prompting Xi is blocked. That’s all there is to it.

Under Xi's dictatorship hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been imprisoned. There's plenty of evidence of forced labor, mass internment and forced sterilization. I don't know how a "hippie" attitude would support this?

Blocking prompts of Xi seems like bowing down to a terrible dictatorship to ensure that this giant market stays open to them. I can easily create prompts for various other dictators that don't allow ridicule in their countries. Try everything from al-Sisi to Museveni to Putin. All of those work easily.

Plenty of companies are adjusting their businesses so they can operate in China. At least they openly admit why they do so.

Don’t you think it’s a tad wrong to ban the chairman but not every other leader? Like China is especially sensitive?

The fact that the treatment is “special” leaves questions about the argument for inclusivity, at least in my book.

> ridiculing politicians in China is taboo

You mean the Chinese politicians that are in power right? Chinese propaganda ridicules constantly politicians from other countries.

Obviously this is just a well calculated move. It's acceptable to mock certain kind of people/groups. That's all there is to it. We don't need to go into Chinese psychology.

This is what can happen when you ridicule Macron in France:

"She currently stands accused of "insulting the president of the republic" and will stand trial on 20 June in Saint Omer, the prosecutor said. She risks a prison sentence and a fine of €15,000 if convicted at the trial." - [0]

Looks like they are learning from the best.

[0] - https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/03/30/heres-the-story-...

Somewhere out there is a good copy-pasta dismissal of these boring reflexive "But look! A Western country did something similar that one time so that makes it okay for us to do!" responses.

To mind reader:

>"that one time so that makes it okay for us to do"

I am not "us". I live in Canada. And I am way more concerned with what we and the West in general are doing in human rights department then what China does. When I see the case dismissed and prosecutor loosing the job I'll be celebrating.

I'll live it to China to sort their own shit.

Yes but China appears to be sorting our shit too.

And very effectively.

You are going to blame China for trying? Last time I checked we have Government with CSIS and other agencies. They should get of their asses and do their job.

Also restoring ability to make staff here rather than getting it from China will not hurt but I am afraid that we have pissed this away permanently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

> Whenever politics or other controversial topics come up, the MJ teams tries to stay out of it.

Actively engaging in censorship is the opposite of staying out of politics. It's engaging with a political system actively.

Currently, Midjourney lets users invite the Midjourney bot to their own private Discord server/channel, where no one else can see the images they generate using that bot.

There's no reason that Midjourney couldn't allow whatever content the user wants to be generated there, as other Midjourney users would not be able to see it.

But they insist on censoring Midjourney even in channels/servers inaccessible to the wider Midjourney audience. Why?

If they did this then they would likely be legally liable for generating child porn in certain countries including the US. And even if it's just regular porn then their credit card processors would ban them and so would any corporate clients. So in the end it's a question of what you censor and not if you censor things.

Hi. I’m a volunteer Midjourney content moderator. They don’t pay me. I’m under no obligation to make them look good.

The team behind MJ are a bunch of overly-nice people. The work very hard night and day to help people bring art into the world. When they see their hard work resulting in porn, gore, gross-out or hate material, it is very discouraging. It’s not material they want to collaborate on. It’s not what they want to work so hard to help bring into the world. Someone else can work to create communities for that.

Quite a lot of blood in the world was spilled by people with "nice" intentions.

Limiting art is one of the worst things one could do, IMHO.

>> When they see their hard work resulting in porn, gore, gross-out or hate material, it is very discouraging. It’s not material they want to collaborate on.

This seems like a fundamental failure to understand humans. One of my favorite Renaissance artists arguably produced gore/gross-out material for his time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Death

I handle most of the moderation of violence and gore. That painting would get a user a message about the violence and gore guidelines, but that’s all. The guidelines are all about avoiding visceral reaction from the viewer. Not visceral like “The war my people endured was horrible”. Visceral like “oh god my face is torn off”, “me punching my girlfriend” or “politician I don’t like not just in hell, but explicitly burning and screaming and suffering painfully in hell.”

We get a lot of death metal fans, 80’s schlock movie fans and a few horror artists that I get to talk to regularly. Pretty much everyone is pretty chill and agrees the guidelines are a good thing for the community. And, the few that don’t agree with MJ’s terms of service are free to do whatever they want elsewhere using Stable Diffusion.

Being uninformed enough to think that ridiculing politicians in China simpliciter is taboo is embarrassing. If he is this ignorant of China, he should let someone else decide, or read a book.

Why would you conflate the rights of free political expression (about an authoritarian dictator, no less) with the regrettable compulsions of anime porn obsessives?

David Holz should be criticized for this decision not to allow satire of Xi Jinping, and harshly.

Xi Jinping at pride parade, by the way: https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1642326687751733251?s=20

It's not taboo, just politically sensitive and dangerous for Chinese citizens because it can get them in trouble. Some like the Chairman but not all of them do.

Today the objection is with jokes about the Chairman. Tomorrow it'll be content about Tiananmen. The day after it'll be about the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, etc. If it were that simple, perhaps Google would have done it long ago. The demands of the Party are never clear and never end.

That's so many words for censorship

I didn't realize he was the guy who founded Leap Motion. I've worked with those devices and the Ultrahaptics that he sold too. It was a very nifty little device that was ahead of it's time and didn't really catch on until competitors had similar capabilities. I think they sold way, way below their peak valuation.

> having people ridicule Xi on MJ would make it unwelcoming to people in China.

Having people depicting women with uncovered hair could make it unwelcoming to people in some Muslim countries, or at least their governments. Should we ban that too ?

What about gay couples kissing ? Should we ban that if (for example) the Russian or Hungarian government ask for that ?

I guess we are lucky that Iran or Russia are not a market as big as China.

> ridiculing politicians in China is taboo, having people ridicule Xi on MJ would make it unwelcoming to people in China

Your entire argument relies on this assumption that I have a hard time to believe. I know close to nothing of Chinese culture but the few Chinese people I know are not shy about criticizing their president or their political class in general. I mean, the "Winnie the pooh" meme comes from China!

People under censorship hates it even if they scared to say so publicly because they are affected by it. Ridiculing politicians in China is only a taboo because those politicians will make people disappear overnight regardless of what the Chinese people think.

Ya, it shouldn't be very surprising that most of the people interested in satirizing the Chinese government are Chinese.

Ah, a pro-dictator fascist that just uses more words to describe their Xi circle jerk.

> teams tries to stay out of it.

There is no "staying out of" politics or just "remaining neutral" on topics (edit: the context here is "when doing business with the one of the belligerents of a conflict, an oppressive regime and so on. Not universally).

Not taking a stand for one side in a two sided topic means taking the other side. Either you are pro gay rights or against it. Or you are pro democracy or against it. Or you are openly against the Russian invasion of Ukraine or you are against it - whether you are silent or not. so long as you do business with or in dictatorships. This applies to any tech company as much as it applies to FIFA or anyone else.

Or you can legitimately not know what to think about any particular issue. Some people don't have a favorite color. Expecting everyone to have a considered opinion about every political topic is just unrealistic.

It has more to do with one side never missing a chance to appropriate your silence.

Yes. And then you probably don't do business in or with a foreign country. The point is that you should know and likely do know, for example, what Qatar thinks about minority rights when you award them a World Cup.

This is an impossible standard to hold people to even on issues in their domestic country.

If you're from the USA, I'm sure that as a well-informed citizen, you know about how the relationship between tribal law and federal law were recently challenged at the Supreme Court (Haaland vs Brackeen), and can provide a reasoned position on the status of Native American tribes and how they should be addressed. After all, it was big news in Native American circles, and silence on that issue is violence towards Native Americans.

"If you're not with us, you're against us" is a pretty reductive, American-centric way of approaching politics. There are plenty of topics which I'm happy to not hold a strong opinion on and I'll probably spend my entire life that way. Folks who feel strongly about _any_ issue will always tell moderates they're just shills for the other side, which is part of what makes the argument so tiresome.

> There are plenty of topics which I'm happy to not hold a strong opinion on and I'll probably spend my entire life that way.

My statement wasn't about opinions in any way. It was basically about the fact that some times an action is already an opinion in itself. You can't e.g. do business in Russia and claim that "we like to remain neutral and stay out of politics/wars (and keep our income from the business in Russia)".

You can of course just not do business in/with Russia and few would wonder whether you have any strong opinions on the conflict. This isn't about forcing anyone to have strong public opinions. It's about that you can't meaningfully separate such opinions from business (or sports, or...)

Which side are you on in the Liancourt Rocks/Takeshima/Dokdo dispute?

Remember, there's no remaining neutral in politics, so I expect a well-reasoned answer on this fundamental territorial rights dispute.

He doesn't know. Not sure what your point is though.

I have no idea what that is, and I hope I'm not passively taking a position in that dispute due to my business involvements (of which are none).

I'm not arguing that everyone have an opinion on everything. I'm arguing that when you do business, you might be taking a side in something whether you would like to or not.

Google does business in both Japan and Korea. What's Google's stance on the Takeshima/Dokdo dispute?

I don’t think it matters to their business or customers. So while they may well be taking a stance without even knowing - no one cares. Few are demanding they leave either country (which is the interesting threshold here).

> I don’t think it matters to their business or customers. So while they may well be taking a stance without even knowing - no one cares.

If Google came out and said "Dokdo is Korea territory" I absolutely guarantee there would be a complete shitstorm in Japan, probably ending with Google getting banned from Japan. You have absolutely no clue what a hot-button issue that is between those countries.

Your initial assertion is just wrong. Businesses stay out of politics all the time.

Another example of how these two countries get pissy about naming things:

We were using Agile Client as our Common Operational Picture tool during a joint exercise with the ROK Marine Corps. The default map layer in Agile has labels on bodies of water in white text built into the imagery. The body of water between Korea and Japan was labeled "Sea of Japan". The Koreans were ADAMANT that we either remove the text or change it to "East Sea". I think we dropped a blue rectangle layer over the text and then another text layer with "East Sea" on top of that. But they repeatedly pestered us about this seemingly-small detail. We're about to get our asses chewed by flag officers for not executing the Commander's Update Brief in timely manner, while also struggling to manage the info flow about the battlespace, but the #1 issue to you is the damn text label on the map mentioning Japan?!?!

> There is no "staying out of" politics or just "remaining neutral" on topics.

How would one determine if this statement is true or not? If true, is the truth universal or contextual?

The context here is "when doing business".

How would one determine if this statement is true or not "when doing business?"

Knowing David personally, I would agree with taking him at face value here.

>"AFAICT, Midjourney has no shareholders and David Holz is the farthest thing from a slick CEO. He’s a big dreamer hippie dork."

I'm trying to figure out the functional difference between a "hippie CEO" and a "slick CEO".

The HBO show Silicon Valley has a satirical business owner who hires a "spiritual adviser" that tells him the most spiritual thing to do is whatever makes him the most money in every situation.

That sounds great, but this is bllsht. They refuse porn explicitly (and stable diffusion as well btw, it's blocked by default but being opensource means that anyone can remove the nsfw filter) whereas there's no such policy about politics, and you can in fact generate political satires for pretty much everyone but Xi, and even the CEO acknowledge that this is done to keep access to the Chinese market (or to preserve “the ability for people in China to use this tech” as he says it).

I don't know why some people wants to keep defending the indefensible, is being a contrarian some kind of addiction?

Holz sold Leap for $30M, which is less than all the funding they raised. I’m assuming his common stock went to 0. So he’s still motivated to make money on MJ, as he should be.

You seem to misunderstand that this is the purpose of censorship by China. It makes political opposition "taboo". To criticize the leader is to seem "dirty", "sus", and "rude".

The rest is done by the desire for social acceptance.

Midjourney is playing directly into China's censorship.

If homosexuality makes people uncomfortable in the Middle East, should Midjourney ban non-sexual depictions of same-sex couples?

So, prompting Xi is blocked. That’s all there is to it.

What's with the dreamer hippie dork façade, then?

Other than as a foil, of course.

Expedience&censorship and accommodating dictatorships are slippery slopes.

Can you guess why "horny teenage boys" aren't as common in Midjourney's space as they are in Stable Diffusion's?

<<Plays South Park episode "Banned in China".>>

It turns out authoritarian power and capital markets can be scary effective. I don't think authoritarian systems are as dynamic and innovative as democratic ones, but a gigantic authoritarian regime can utilize external democracies for innovation and then leverage their market power to silence criticism both home and abroad.

Creative tools that impede free speech are harbingers of Orwellian future. "Sorry, you are not allowed to express that thought".

Chinese encroachment of free speech outside China should be fought against, not aided. I'm in the camp that thinks it's normal for countries to have legal systems and value systems incompatible with each other - but I'm not ok with companies and individuals aiding an authoritarian regime to spread their influence globally just to extract profit.

These new models could be the downfall of authoritarian regimes. These regimes rely on suppressing access to information but soon we'll have an LLM that can answer any questions about the world and fit on a USB stick that can be passed from person to person. No more great firewall of China.

Encyclopedias exist today as well, and already fit on USB sticks. Still, Britannica has yet to topple the Chinese political system, and ChatGPT will not succeed either.

Modern authoritarian states are extremely adept at controlling the spread of information. LLMs are not even a drop in the bucket for what the state apparatus can do. If sharing USB sticks with LLMs that talk about the Tiananmen massacre ever became popular, you would get USB sticks that talk about how these are Western lies the very next day.

> Britannica has yet to topple the Chinese political system, and ChatGPT will not succeed either

Text versus images? China’s urban elite are comfortable. They live a first-world life. China is a middle economy because the fruits of its gains haven’t reached the periphery. I can see Beijing being fearful of visual satire that can be perceived by a farmer in a way that written text, particularly English text, isn’t an issue.

There are several differences between LLMs and encyclopedias - LLMs don't need specific text about specific events in Chinese. They can be trained in text in English and produce answers in Chinese via translation. - LLMs probably need much more text to corrupt their veracity -- yet to be tested properly - LLMs are more obfuscated in their purpose. If I'm sharing a text about a specific event then that is pretty damning, but if an LLM can answer questions about an event then you can't prove that was why I was sharing it. In fact it would be pretty hard to exclude information about specific events from an LLM

Raspberry Pi could include that with Mathematica in their default OS install :)

I guess they are still a bit too heavy for small ARM boards but they are probably implemented in a way that is amenable to lots of systems engineering / demoscene optimizations.

Maybe demoscene will branch off into optimizing AI - ”here’s my llama 64kb demo…” :D

How much disk space does an LLM like GPT-4.0 need?

Didn't we say the same thing about Wikipedia?

Wikipedia, whose concept of free speech is, "You can freely edit our encyclopedia as long as you cite CNN"

And the internet, liberalization, free trade, etc.

Propaganda has seemed pretty effective even with unfettered access to information, LLMs and free speech in the west.

Ok, and whoever is caught with one of those will disappear, and so will all their family/friends. Are you willing to risk your life for information? Proxies that bypass the great firewall already exist, but most people avoid them because they're not worth the risk

Quite apart from arguments about the effectiveness of authoritarian regimes to prevent this, we would first need an LLM that can be trusted not to make stuff up.

The "truth" is not enough. Look into Tian'Anmen and how the subject is completely taboo across generations. How to change social norms is a whole another thing.

You can already fit something like 800,000 books on a 256 GB USB stick.

An LLM isn't going to be more effective.

The solution to speech ban, is exactly like the alcohol ban which occurred in America at some point. When alcohol prohibition was happening at New York, it was Greek gangs which transported illegal alcohol, executing snitches and blackmailing cops and stuff. The Italian word mafia, started to describe that kind of situation, only after Italian gangs overthrew Greek gangs in the dominance of the black market at New York.

A black market for speech, is the ideal solution. As soon as people desire certain information on the internet, someone will find a way to provide it to them, for double, triple or 10 times the price. A black market of information just opens up some opportunities, that's all i am saying.

But to have a black market there has to be a market to begin with. Bitcoin, not BTC will create new opportunities for all kinds of markets.

Bitcoin is 100% traceable, and lots of black markets have been shut down for using it.

Yes indeed, it is 100% percent traceable, but many black market organizations are not taken down, not because they avoid detection, but because the leaders of the operation are untouchable in some way or another.

But i think you are referring to BTC, and BTC is not Bitcoin. Btc doesn't support small enough transactions for it to function as a market of information, let alone black market of information.

>> “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.”

How about "the ability for people to be free and have free systems and society is more important than the money we hope to get from doing business in China".

But here we are in Silicon Valley where business and money rise above all else including national sovereignty.

As long as western companies can’t do unrestricted business in China, neither should Chinese companies be able here. The earlier we break the toxic relationship, the better.

But yeah, money over everything.

> As long as western companies can’t do unrestricted business in China, neither should Chinese companies be able here.

Well, they can't and they don't. They have to follow the local laws.

Facebook, for example, doesn't operate in China because Facebook made the deliberate decision that they don't want to follow the same laws Chinese companies have to follow. Their comment was this: “We need to figure out a solution that is in line with our principles and what we want to do, and in line with the laws there, or else it’s not going to happen. Right now, there isn’t an intersection.”

True, but it’s not like there is any parity between the laws. China now is not the China of twenty years ago.

There. Is. No. such. Thing. As. Local. Law.

There is a fine mist of ilusion of rule of law. But the party is outside of it. And the truth is, the laws is more similar to the law of network connections within the family graph of a mafia clan.

Its basically just used as a body wrapping foil, once the graph has decided to finnish of some node. Stop projecting western values upon a completely different scenario, just because its apt at mimicrcy.

What do you mean by “there is no such thing as local law”?

You mean in the context of China specifically or in general?

In the context of china. And its reflected in the sallaries. Its a decorative position of a society pretending to be ruled by law. But in the end its not. So why pay them as good as they do in the west.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-lawyer-in-Chin...

Who are you quoting here when you link to that Quora question, and what does pay have to do with anything?

I'm as lost as you. How did we land on a quora question about Lawyers salaries in China in a discussion about following laws. Go figure.

A lawyer in the west is basically a guidance councelor for CEOs or politicians, determinating how much and how they can move within the system to a position. It is paid accordingly, if work occurs in this capacity. The rule of law is detectable by the price that can be extracted for providing the service to move within the framework and not violating it, aka incur punishment.

If that pay is low, then there is no punishment for violations, or the punishment depends on different criteria entirely. Which could be formulated as a lack of rule of law. There might be invisible rules, ceremonys, within the party, but they are not enforceable, except by higher layers in court. And they are also not part of the discussion scope.

Honestly this is my main problem with TikTok. I know Meta and Google spy just as much as TikTok. However it is problematic that Chinese app companies have full access to Western markets while the reverse is severely limited.

I'm not sure why this point isn't rammed home at every opportunity. Reciprocity is a cornerstone of many trade agreements and tariffs/protectionism are a common answer to foreign government favoritism of domestic companies (e.g. CCP protecting its own).

No one should be able to do unregulated business anywhere. Trading with China is good but they shouldn't be able to influence our culture to conform to the whims of their government at all

Good luck buying any* kind of products when China is out of the picture.

I mean, doesn't the concept of a free society apply to private corporations as well? The government is not restricting you; the private company is exercising its right to run its business according to its own free will. The principle of a free society suggests that "if you don't like the company's policy, find another one or create your own." Is that wrong?

Or course, and their decisions are free to be scrutinized.

Scrutiny is justified. However, it should be within the scope of whether the product fulfills the need and should have nothing to do with "sovereignty" or "free speech rights," don't you think?

Can't believe how often I see this sentiment, and how nonsensical it is.

We're private citizens, nothing prevents us from criticizing them for a wide variety of reasons. If you want to restrict yourself and ignore everything except the literal function of the product, you're free to do that, but you can't argue everyone else has to do the same.

Or is your argument that we have some kind of social responsibility to judge products based on exclusively on what the product does, but the product has no social responsibility whatsoever? That's a double standard that can't have any justification.

No one is preventing you from criticizing them. I am just saying that criticism from the standpoint of free speech or sovereignty is inconsistent with the idea that you can satirize whatever or whoever you want.

> I am just saying that criticism from the standpoint of free speech or sovereignty is inconsistent with the idea that you can satirize whatever or whoever you want.

I don't understand what you are saying. Criticising a company on free speech grounds who prevent you from satirising someone is absolutely consistent. What inconsistency are you seeing?

> the private company is exercising its right to run its business according to its own free will.

Let's run with that.

Should a company be allowed to own slaves?

Should a company be allowed to do business with a company that owns slaves?

For the record: pretty much all clothing is still created with effectively slave labour.

Either in the harvesting of the cotton, refinement to cloth, sewing to clothing or finally when dyeing.

And the second example: apple still has an assembly manned by Uruguay internment slaves and pretty much everyone here fawns over it every chance they get.

So from the perspective of HN both of these are seemingly acceptable

Additionally there is prison labor which is legal in the U.S. to force someone to do.

Prison labor allows companies to purchase labor at a rate the non-incarcerated worker can't afford to sell their labor at.

>Should a company be allowed to own slaves?

No, because slavery is illegal.

>Should a company be allowed to do business with a company that owns slaves?

They do, all the time. Manufacturing, mining (particularly of the rare earth metals that go into electronics) and agriculture all depend on slave labor.

Should the second one be illegal as well?

What is the functional difference between the two besides more paperwork and another middle man taking a cut?

It certainly should be illegal, but a lot of the comforts of first-world civilization would vanish and the velocity of modern capitalism would grind to a halt, so politically speaking apart from token gestures that don't threaten the status quo that isn't likely to happen.

I think generally owning slaves goes against the idea of freedom (let's discard the concept one has the freedom to sell themselves for once). Thus company does not have the right to own slaves.

No, that is not wrong. Nor is it wrong to dislike what a company does and try to get them to change.

People don't automatically be free if every western company stops doing business in China. Withdrawing from the market can't really do anything about that unless it can put a lot of pressure on the power holders.

You can make satire on Biden and Putin, but for Xi Jingping:

> We just want to minimize drama,” the company’s founder and CEO, David Holz, said last year in a post on the chat service Discord. “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” he added, and “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.

Principles are pretty important to some people, too.

Companies are not people. The CEO might have principles, but he cannot apply his own principles to the company. The only principle for a company is to maximise profit within the legal restrictions.

Depends on the company. Conscious Capitalism and the Infinite Game are great books on why that's not the best approach.

This comment sounds clever but makes no sense. The CEO can and must apply his principles to the company if he wants to consider himself moral under his own code.

Just think it through; is he morally bound to actively pump out lies and propaganda if that increases profits?

Either you make money in China until the Chinese clone your tech and undercut you, or you don't make that money and they eventually clone and undercut anyway. Might as well enjoy the boost for a few months.

I don't like that we're self-censoring in the West in a way that furthers the ends and whims of authoritarian regimes, but hey, it's only business...

> you make money in China until the Chinese clone your tech and undercut you, or you don't make that money and they eventually clone and undercut anyway

Or you stand by something and innovate, while using Beijing trying to clone your tech as reason for Congress giving you an unfair advantage. Holz has chosen his side. I’m now in favour of unfairly advantaging his competition.

Quite. And that, too, is only business ;-)

> is he morally bound to actively pump out lies and propaganda if that increases profits?

That's why I said "within legal restrictions". Ethics is not something defined for companies, even though we are led to believe that it is. It's for people.

He could resign on his personal beliefs, or get fired if he can't sustain the growth, of course, but that doesn't change the fact that the next CEO will probably do it.

That's one theory. There's a competing theory that corporations have obligations to shareholders, customers, employees, and the community in which they operate. And as a practical matter, corporations can usually get away "doing the right thing" if they really want to, as it is good for the company's reputation in the long run, and therefore at least theoretically good for shareholders.

While this may be true in a general sense in that most companies have bylaws that does not set out another purpose, and that in theory shareholders could go after a board, and so indirectly a CEO, that does not seek to maximise profit, this is overly simplistic.

The CEO is beholden to the directions of the board. The board has wide latitude to act within the rather wide remit of acting within the best interests of the shareholders (as a group, not individual shareholders). It's generally difficult to go after a board for setting direction that does not outright maximise profit other than by simply voting them out as long as there's some reasoning to justify why it is beneficial to the mission of the company to do something. That might e.g. be to ensure the reputation of the company.

So as long as the CEO acts within what the board wants of them, and as long as the board maintains the trust of a majority of shareholders and aren't outright and blatantly violating the corporate bylaws (which can also specify other priorities than just profit), they can - and often do - decide that other things than profit matters.

As such, blaming the CEO in isolation may not be justified. Maybe the board made him. But the company certainly has principles in the form of its bylaws and the AGM and boards interpretation of them. The just might not be nice ones.

What board? Midjourney has no investors. No shareholders.

He’s only beholden to himself. And proud of it.

Midjourney is an incorporated company. It has a board and at least one shareholder. Whether or not they're all the same person is irrelevant to the point made, which is that this annoying notion people keep bringing up when a CEO makes a choice that they're somehow inherently required to do what maximises profit is false.

> As such, blaming the CEO in isolation may not be justified. Maybe the board made him.

You made a general point. I agree with your general point.

That last statement seemed to me to be about Midjourney specifically.

In which case, because of Midjourney’s peculiar situation for this kind of company, it would have been inaccurate.

And even if said statement wasn’t about Midjourney specifically, considering the subject at hand, pointing out it’s peculiar situation seemed relevant.

But again, I totally agree that no, even though it’s often expected of them, CEOs aren’t inherently required to maximise profit.

It's not inaccurate, though. Midjourney, Inc. is a Delaware registered corporation. It has a board, and at least one shareholder. They can both be the same person as the CEO, but that doesnt change any of what I wrote.

I don't know, maybe you interpreted the last paragraph as making a specific claim about Midjourney, but it did not. It was part of the general point.

Thats actually a pretty reasonable response. Its not endorsing the censorship, and it emphasises that not restricting certain generated content would hurt users.

Unlike social media which stores and distributes, Midjourney is helping generate content, so people can still make satire through other mechanisms pretty easily - and since Midjourney isn't a distribution platform its not hurting users ability to distribute satire.

> Thats actually a pretty reasonable response. Its not endorsing the censorship, and it emphasises that not restricting certain generated content would hurt users.

it's reasonable but it's just a purely capital-aligned choice -- the morals and ethics of it are beside the point.

They want China because it's a big market -- but Midjourney produces content -- especially political satire -- that is illegal in dozens of countries... apparently China deserves special attention.

I'll say it plain: They kowtow to China because China represents $$ for them. The "pretty-not-okay"ness is just a happy coincidence for the users who may become legal targets.

> emphasises that not restricting certain generated content would hurt users.

Being nice to person B threatening person A is not being nice to person A.

The ability for us to make money in china is more important than your ability to generate satire

At least there aren't any mental gymnastics here, his reasoning is pretty clear and understandable from a CEO point of view.

? No mental gymnastics? Sure there are!

“Use this tech” implies the same tech as everyone else, including satire, no? What else could it mean? Oh, it could mean, “use this tech in only ways that are allowed by a totalitarian dictator, continuing to spread china’s government’s racism and hatred of certain minorities, and also normalize self-censorship globally”.

That’s really what it means-that it’s more important to the CEO that China should continue suppression of its people and also to exert the maximum influence it can socially on the world, than it is too stop specifically midjourney in China.

Plenty of mental gymnastics required there.

Let's everyone pull out of doing business with all Chinese in China...

and see how well that works in altering the course if history.

I see that worked pretty well for North Korea already :^)

"the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire."

The implication here being that the ability to generate a million waifu anime selfie blended pictures is somehow a crucial technology.

The only reason Putin is not off limit is because Russia's GDP is smaller than Canada's GDP.

It seems we have reached the point in our existence as a society where it is time to take a stand.

Who are we? What values do we share? What behavior are we willing to tolerate? How much will it cost us to allow a company or an individual to compromise our principles?

A lot of people, far too many in fact, allow greed to define themselves. Profit above all else.

Those people should be universally vilified and removed from positions of power or influence.

Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh or as Porky Pig. Take your pick. If he is offended then that is simply a sign of his own personal weakness, a character defect of which we all know he has many. Pity the weak bastard that can't take criticism and never, ever put them in a position of power.

> Who are we? What values do we share? What behavior are we willing to tolerate? How much will it cost us to allow a company or an individual to compromise our principles?

Do you think these are questions where a single answer can be found? Don’t you think that different societies will inevitably have different opinions on those subjects?

I expect that there are many different ways to answer those questions and that the answers will likely vary for any number of reasons. I also expect that behind most of those answers is a thread that links all of us to some common ground which should serve as the foundation for our belief system and a point where we can all drink from the same cup and resolve to find ways to understand why our answers differ and to accept those valid answers and then work together for things that benefit us all.

That is a great answer and a wonderful way to look at things. Thank you for that, really.

You're 70 years too late, these questions have been answered for you

I'm not sure that I can be too late. Tech trends over the last 20 years clearly demonstrate that societal mores can be shaped to fit any desired value set in less than a generation.

We are always in a state of flux but we are not necessarily ever truly fucked until we ignore the fact that we can change all of it for the better.

> It’s not just Midjourney’s China-based users that can’t satirize Xi Jinping — that rule applies to users everywhere, even in the United States.

I'm speechless and a bit scared...

Just looked up his bio :

After Leap Motion, Holz started wondering about what the future would look like, and what people would need in this uncertain future.

He came up for 3 pillars for what he thought would be the most important: reflection, imagination, and coordination.

Looks like he tramples on his own pillars.

> reflection, imagination, and coordination

Those are buzzwords that mean absolutely anything you want them to mean.

"While reflecting on the future he desired for the company he is CEO of, Holz imagined how much more money he could make by keeping Midjourney available in China and coordinated the necessary actions to make it impossible to produce content about Xi Jinping"

I am not going to defend Chinese censorship - I think it is way overdone and a huge waste of resources but all companies operating in China must uphold this regime and pay the cost associated with it.

However all countries have laws and norms governing satire and free speech.

For example the Mohammed cartoons (deliberately drawn to trigger a reaction / discussion of free speech and censorship):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_car...

Or this Australian drawing of American tennis superstar Serena Williams:

https://amp.abc.net.au/article/10844900

Widely seen as racist by the American audience.

Being offended, and censoring are two different things.

Free speech should allow speech that offends people.

The first is an example of a drawing censored in a large part of the world.

The second is an example of a cartoon that likely would have been deemed against “media standards” had the organ that did the assessment been in the US and not in Australia.

Many countries have laws against homosexual displays of affection, so by that logic, Midjourney should remove any LGBT content.

I would guess they end up disabling functionality by geolocation.

Mid journey is already fairly heavy handed in terms of its onerous restrictions and puritanical censorship (blood, gore, etc), so this comes as no surprise.

I find myself having to turn more and more to stable diffusion models to finish a lot of my concept work.

I can’t get stable diffusion to do a 1/10th of what I can do in MJ. I’ve followed guides, tried different parameters, etc etc.

Any tips you’ve picked up?

In my opinion MJ v5 has better generations on average than a well-customised SD pipeline, but only by a little bit. SD definitely requires more work in terms of set-up and greater specificity in your prompt text.

I would recommend downloading one of the more aesthetically pleasing models from Huggingface or Civit.ai, such as "Deliberate", "Protogen" or "Realistic Vision".

Using 'clip interrogator' on existing images that you find appealing can be a great way to find interesting keywords to include in your prompts.

If you're comfortable hooking things together in a node based UI, I would recommend ComfyUI as it can give you greater flexibility around how your images are generated.

What kind of images are you trying to generate? I can maybe give some more specific advice on that.

Quick question: is avoid prompting Xi / disabling satire about Xi the sufficient condition that would make Midjourney accessible to the people in China?

The answer is: NO. That's the point.

Is satire on June 4th, 1989, the tiananmen square massacre allowed in China? No! Is satire on COVID and Wuhan allowed in China? No! ... This list is so long in China that, eventually, if any person wants satire on some forbidden topics using Midjourney, this tool will be blocked. And very likely it would happen. The demand is not smaller than the endless gallery of women with huge boobs. So this is a hard problem.

Required reading for those who aren't already convinced that we very urgently need fully open source generative AI models.

Thankfully we have Stable Diffusion.

Individuals like LeBron James do it — a self proclaimed human rights activist. Companies do it. I have yet to see a public entity who has a spine on this topic and is well respected.

It's obvious this is a business decision, not some conclusion of "exploring the cultural differences of different countries, and China has a more respectful culture".

It’s capitalism and centralized control. Once again, Linux and open source projects, scientists etc. do not have such an issue.

Their software is available to everyone everywhere. These organizations have taken a “stance” alright — and that is basically that anyone can use it for any purpose. Including satire!

I bet you Stable Diffusion won’t have such a controversy.

The fact that GitHub had to beg the permission of the US government to let their centralized platform serve open source software to Iran says quite a lot. It shows how centralized governments and corporations create the problems to start with, whereas gift economies don’t have any of these problems

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/5/22215588/github-iran-sanct...

Maybe I'm naive but I think it's a strong argument on why China won't catch up with the tech of LLM's and diffusion anytime soon. Half of their effort goes to censorship.

ChatGPT also is being censored pretty heavily.

If you browse https://paperswithcode.com you'll find when you look at the highest performing models on a given dataset, you're as likely to see Nanjing, Shanghai or Tsinghua as you are to see Stanford, MIT or UCLA.

IMHO there's a good chance China already has the lead here.

The US is doing the same exact thing but it's called 'alignment' and instead of 'censorship' we call it 'safety'.

For context, it seems Midjourney blocks a ton of terms and none of this is particularly new. Not sure if there's an official list anywhere.

https://decentralizedcreator.com/list-of-banned-words-in-mid...

The real kicker here is that this functionality is blocked not only in China but globally. That is indefensible, at the very least provide some timeline or assurance that such restrictions will be limited to users of that particular country. It is natural to have different rules around content in different countries, whether you agree with those rules or not. But doing it this way you are setting rules for all users based on what the most restrictive, authoritarian countries will allow.

It is the same with Hollywood, they have completely caved in, and it is a mockery of the idea of free and creative expression. Like in any good censorship regime, the creators are chaining themselves, no state intervention needed!

Just incredible.

I thought Midjourney works only on Discord, which is blocked in China?

That was my thought too, but my understanding is that the usage of VPNs is pretty ubiquitous in China, and that the government for the most part looks the other way.

What happens if you ask Midjourney for a picture of Mohammad?

I tried it on DallE and it says "It looks like this request may not follow our content policy."

Firefly returns "One or more words violate Firefly user guidelines. Please edit and try again." with a picture of a very cute monkey. However, Xi Jinping riding a bike works just fine, although, the results look nothing at all like Xi Jinping riding a bike.

Remarkable especially given the hugely viral “Pope” AI images of the last few weeks.

What makes it remarkable?

Perhaps the double standard that some political and religious figures are subject to satire, while others are held to be sacrosanct and untouchable.

And that these protections would be enforced by silicon valley progressives, whom followers of those figures would gladly torture and execute if given the opportunity.

I can understand (although don’t agree with) a decision to block these things based on respecting everyone’s religious beliefs. Blocking satire of a specific religion though points towards caving to fear rather than a rational policy choice.

It rather depends though doesn't it. It's very clear in Islam that images of the prophet are forbidden, they find it offensive. So out of respect it would seem reasonable to disable that. It's not then reasonable to disable generating images of jesus or the pope. Why? Because christians don't object to images of the pope or jesus. If there were specific things that christians found offensive, I think it's reasonable to disable those things too. It's not giving Muslims special treatment, it's about being respectful to all religions, it's just that being respectful means making reasonable adjustments for each of their concerns.

I think you are ignoring the elephent in the room:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting

I think the concern is more that someone will show up and murder everyone in your office for allowing drawings of the prophet Mohammed than concern it is "offensive" per se.

I'm not blaming a company for making the decision to not put their employees lives in jeopardy, but let's not pretend this is some benign judgement call over whether to offend someone.

The terrorists won.

You can say you wouldn't mock the prophet Mohammed because you fear some Islamic terrorists might come after you. I understand that. But you can't say that's why someone else is choosing not to, as I explained - I wouldn't depict the prophet simply because I think it's disrespectful to Muslims. You shouldn't impose your reasons on someone else. Personally, I don't think you can point to 1 terrorist incident almost a decade ago and say that somehow that's changed everyone's behavior. If it has, that would be weird - we don't avoid criticizing Mohammed bin Salman or Vladmir Putin despite knowing for a fact that they've both ordered the assassination of their critics/enemies.

You can explain why you personally would not draw the prophet Mohammed but we're not talking about you, we're talking about a company in the business of generating A.I. drawings I believe.

Or maybe we're more generally talking about a hypothetical media company, I'm not sure.

We know for a fact that high profile media companies avoid drawing Mohammed due to death threats, not out of sensitivy to people of faith:

"South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were threatened in 2010 for the prior depictions of Muhammad. That prompted Comedy Central to remove voice and visual references in the episodes, and eventually to pull the entire episodes from streaming."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/deadline.com/2020/06/south-park...

That incident I linked to wasn't the only terrorist incident so I don't think your characterization of why I linked to that attack is reasonable, you seem to be implying that I drew a wild conclusion based on one incident, as if I couldn't possibly have been aware of other attacks.

I'm confused about your reference to Putin. As far as I know he only orders assassinations of Russians and Russian ex-pats and non- Russians making fun of him have been perfectly safe.

It worked on Stable Diffusion

I don’t think that’s a comparable dynamic. Censoring your users to avoid being murdered is much more sympathetic than censoring your users to protect your Chinese market access.

Apparently it's banned along with a bunch of other terms: https://decentralizedcreator.com/list-of-banned-words-in-mid...

This was a sensible response. China, unlike the U.S, will focus its resources on destroying Midjourney and the lives of people running it. Don't think for a moment that the U.S. government will protect your business, you or your family. Pick your battles wisely and decide whether freedom of speech involving Winnie the Xi Jinping are worth protecting.

In the same country: overseas students from China make death threats to fellow students they consider Chinese if they hold inconvenient views, with no consequences (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593320)

Not a new thing here at all. This has been true since Tiananmen Square. They place their students in the position of having to report each other for speaking about it and use the threat of harm to their family back home to enforce it.

Anyone like this greedy Midjourney guy who would bow down to that fat-ass Jinping needs the entire family to be forced to surrender their passports, be stripped of their citizenship, and be sent over there to live the rest of their lives permanently barred from re-entry and from any business relationships over here.

There's an additional threat in that overseas students must report regularly to the party otherwise their funding will be cut and they will be sent home. (This applies to Chinese funded students not those funded by overseas grants etc)

Yes I have heard of that too. Thanks for reminding me of this additional pressure point.

I wonder whether US students studying abroad feel any pressure to serve as remote eyes and ears for US corporations or the government. My first guess is that they don't but that may be my own naive guess since the answer could depend on their chosen field of study and their source of capital for their education. 'I don't know the answer' is the correct reply that I have for that.

I'm sure Midjourney CEO won't object should someone create satire memes about him using his own platform.

Turns out China can pressure content on apps outside China as well, making the TikTok brouhaha even more pointless.

It demonstrates that Chinas influence is already too big, making TikTok regulation even more urgent.

Out of curiosity, who do you want to have a big influence?

Not China, nor any other non-democratically governed country.

How about a flawed democracy?

At least you can criticize it with a far lower risk of disappearing.

If I may point out here that if we take the word "democracy" at face value (i.e. That the ruling entity needs to have the support of the majority of demos) then most countries are really not democratically governed:

The people in charge get voted in by a minority of the people who go to vote - which gets even worse if you account for people who are eligible to vote but abstain.

> The people in charge get voted in by a minority of the people who go to vote

Except for a couple examples in the US, I'm not aware of democratic countries where this has actually occurred.

And in the US, it's not a common occurrence.

in almost any election in every European country the voter presence is 50% or below. I think that's what the comment was about... is just a small % of people that participate in voting and even smaller percentage that votes for the winner.

The quote I responded to was explicitly about a minority of people who opted into voting. Other parts of the comment included nonvoters, but that's a different discussion.

Average voter participation is 65% in european countries.

> the voter presence is 50% or below

What do you mean by "voter presence"? And 50% of what? Of registered voters? Of people eligible to vote?

Because statistics would beg to differ. [^1]

It might hold for european elections [^2], as almost nobody seems to care about those, leading to a low turnout, but that definitely isn’t true about national elections.

[1]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/these-countries-have-...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/05/27/europe...

Surely you've heard of Australia?

This paper discusses minority governments in Australia between 1989 and 2009, a period of two decades in which there have been at least ten examples of this political phenomenon in the Australian States and Territories.

https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/researchpapers/Pages/minor...

If I was paying any attention at all recently it was on the fact that we've had at least a few minority governments since 2009 also.

Finland is having a minority government now too:

With all of the votes counted on Sunday, the right-wing National Coalition party (NCP) won 20.8% of the vote, with the populist, nation-first Finns party scoring 20.1%. Marin’s SDP took 19.9% of the vote. Voter turnout was 71.9%.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/02/sanna-marin-fi...

> (i.e. That the ruling entity needs to have the support of the majority of demos)

There is nothing undemocratic about federalist republics. Or parliamentary democracies that require coalitions to rule. They are simply different kinds of democracy.

Not "who", but "what".

Principled arguments which can openly compete and evolve in the marketplace of ideas. Probably not state actors of any flavor, but this isn't necessarily exclusive of them.

Unfortunately things are not so simple. You can find satire of Xi Jinping on TikTok right now: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/xi-jinping-winnie-the-pooh?l..., but not on Midjourney anymore. So, ironically, banning TikTok would suppress speech critical to the CCP more than banning Midjourney, a US company.

> So, ironically, banning TikTok would suppress speech critical to the CCP more than banning Midjourney, a US company.

The ban would be outside of China. Speech critical of the CCP is only really effective if it reaches inside of China and banning TikTok outside of China would have a negligible effect on the other side of TGF.

Midjourney is banning Xi Jinping satire everywhere, also outside China.

China can get data from TikTok whenever it wants, that's not quite the same as success campaigns for selective censorship.

Well, yes, those AIs are used inside of china, instead of tiktok which only exists outside of china. But AI represents a conundrum for censors.

Normally they would just steal it with some cooperate espionage, but they then have not the expertise to retrain it or censor it properly themselves. So i guess the censorship is only temporary, until a chinese version of midjourney can be retrained on the data from within the golden shield project.

But that AI will be largely useless, as it will spout mostly little red book Xi thought and other propaganda.

>Local laws are suddenly not so local anymore, and people like Holz have no qualms about aiding their illiberal international spread.

Okay, after decades on an American internet where a nipple is often enough to provoke censorship I do have to laugh a little bit about the sudden insight that large nations, shockingly enough, have influence beyond their own borders.

What do you mean? American internet is full of porn.

Nothing new or unexpected sadly. Even the most vocal critics of the US government and its policies (including all the "pro freedom of speech", "anti woke culture" types) will quickly get in line and shut up as soon as China is involved in the conversation. Absolute authoritarianism and economic power is a very dangerous combination.

All of freedom of speech promoters like Elon Musk would only talk about positive things about China when it comes to sensitive topic. Xi is probably the most powerful person on earth when you think about it.

> individual countries’ censorship laws, particularly those of powerful countries like China

Or the US ?

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-facebook-frenc...

Would it be remotely possible to make a law to prevent this 'voluntary' deification of international despots?

> Would it be remotely possible to make a law to prevent this 'voluntary' deification of international despots?

Probably not. What we may need are export restrictions and subsidies for researchers who develop models that adhere to our values.

In what country? In the US, this would be an incredible Constitutional violation.

I think history's going to have quite a bit to say about the individuals who've chosen to take this stance. I don't buy the argument that it's just business either, last I checked Patrick Collison and Jack Dorsey were doing pretty well for themselves.

> Companies like Midjourney may be the vanguard of new technology and the changing internet. But censorship is nothing new, and they won’t change the game by willingly conducting reputation management for authoritarian governments.

> That, one might say, is “pretty not-okay.”

Money quote right there

Midjourney already bans Muhammad. Is this different?

https://decentralizedcreator.com/list-of-banned-words-in-mid...

AI has a privacy problem right now where the most capable models are available only on cloud services that censor and access your input and output data. The gap between the state-of-the-art and private alternatives is especially large in text generation.

Why don’t they just restrict it in China and not restrict it for people outside of China?

I actually think having one person in the whole world you can't generate images of sends a much stronger political message than allowing people to make funny pictures of said person in puffer jackets.

Sorry I will oppose Chinese censorship until I die and no amount of (good-willed) reverse psychology will make me give them a pass.

If there's one thing I'm certain of, it's that younger me had no business telling older me what he should or shouldn't do.

Sorry, I don't quite follow, can you elaborate?

Are you certain you'll hold any particular opinion for the rest or your life?

Good point, one cannot be.

It does. That message is “this person has power over you” and “this person is to be feared” while the alternative is “this person is to be mocked” because in mockery society reclaims power over dictators.

It’s not an accident that most dictators try to control political satire.

The media here in Australia love to point our how sensitive and thin skinned the Chinese Government is. Mockery cuts deepest when pointing out actual flaws.

There is nothing remotely surprising about this. It's Silicon Valley.

What is surprising is he doesnt appear to be hiding his hypocrisy/self-interest behind a "woke" camouflage.

Speaking of which, presumably ChatGPT with its close association with China is also deferential to the chilling effects of Chinese demands, preferences, requests and requirements?

Not in the US, based on a few basic queries I just ran

What is the close association you’re referring to?

Sorry that was a mistype, I meant "close association with Microsoft".

Many topics are censored in China. Are they going to try and keep up with all of them? For example, what would happen if someone asked for tank man dressed as a superhero?

There are so few photos of the tank man, so I highly doubt if AI can understand this concept as well as it understands "Xi Jinping".

My Xi satire created with Craiyon a few months back:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_5lZo6UlVlY

He has Chinese employees. Some of them will be pro China and pro censorship. And all of them are under Chinese law despite living abroad. He has no choice.

This leaves me wondering. Who and what is the biggest existential threat to humanity, sentient artificial intelligence or tyrannical governments?

Tyrannical governments with access to sentient artifical intelligence?

as an outsider who doesn't even use MJ, they are private entitty and are free to do whatever they please. it is not that they are the only GANs capable of generating images.

if your only complaint about this topic is that you want winnie the pooh a certain way, go use the other ways possible to express your freedom of easel drawing.

You can't log in to Midjourney from China anyway, as Discord has been blocked a while back. So only VPN users will have access.

We seem to have a arrived at a stage of collective thought in which every action which is not directly confrontational against those that have a different belief system, is seen an acknowledgement of its support. Discussions on any topic have become so polarising that even those that try to remain neutral are being met with hostility and cancel culture treatment.

I have never been so pessimistic about the future of the world as I am today.

OpenAI also does this with DallE, fyi.

Western corporation have been kowtow to China for its market for a long time like NBA, Disney...etc.

Discord is blocked in china long ago

There's a fine line when it comes to AI. On one hand it's not great that OpenAI/MS/MJ get to decide what is okay and what isn't okay. On the other hand without filters, the possibility for misinformation, spam and inciting violence/drama/frustration is high since the cost to create tons of garbage is so low.

I'm more worried about AI supercharged bait-click content than GPT-5 singularity.

China is stealing territories from our country. He knows why he's being ridiculed

This is weirdly relevant -- I made some funny soviet-style propaganda posters the last few days and it happily let me generate them for Gaddafi, Putin, Kim Jong-un, etc. but when I wrote Xi Jinping it rejected it. I tried "general secretary of CCP" but the results weren't even remotely resembling Xi Jinping, so I assume they even removed him from the training data.

I think this is a time for people to realize that political satire has absolutely no influence whatsoever on the political regimes it aims to satirize. The amount of satire levied against Donald Trump, measured in tweets, art, comedy routines, scathing op-eds and every thought or public expression of ill will surpasses that of every other leader in human history by a large margin.

And all in all it had little to no effect. You can't topple a regime by laughing at it. There's a reason kings in the middle ages hired jesters to make fun of them.

He failed in his bid for reelection though. I guess you could criticise comedians, satirists, cartoonists for failing to mobilise a revolutionary movement to oust him from office by force before any election, but I don't think that was ever their aim.

Sure, I’ve been aware of that since the 80s when a generation of comics cut their teeth mercilessly satirising Margaret Thatcher here in the uk. I grew up on it. Had zero political effect whatsoever, but it’s still a valuable and important free speech right.

> You can’t topple a regime by laughing at it.

The purpose of the satire is not to affect politics. It is a healthy expression of a free society.

a regime that doesn’t tolerate laughing at it is almost always authoritarian and kept in place undemocratically.

Trump is a bad example considering satire should punch upwards to be successful or you just end up mocking someone. With Trump you had had billion dollar companies, media, Silicon Valley and Hollywood backing the movement. In contrast, we have serious discussions on "how far-right groups use memes to radicalize people". Satire works by creating a discussion and pushing opinion on dangerous/sensitive topics but it only works when you're the underdog.

Hi concept ideas from holtz? Nah. Greed. He wants chinese sized top line growth.and yes the free speech is still a problem too

Pretty much if China was like a poor nation he wouldn't care.

Or maybe he’s playing the long game. Lose a pawn to get a king.

Genuine question:

What could be a more logical thing to do than what he did?

> What could be a more logical thing to do than what he did?

Not get involved. (See: OpenAI.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com