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Comment by photoGrant | Hacker News Reader

Remind yourself we're discussing censorship, misinformation, inability to define or source truth and we're concerned on Day 1 about the results of image gen being controlled by a for profit single entity with incentives that focus solely on business and not humanity...

Where do we go from here? Things will magically get better on their own? Businesses will align with humanity and morals, not their investors?

This is the tip of the iceberg of concerns and it's ignored as a bug in the code not a problem with trusting private companies with defining truth.

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The ridiculous degree of PC alignment of corporate models is the thing that's going to let open source win. Few people use bing/dall-e, but if OpenAI had made dall-e more available and hadn't put ridiculous guardrails on it, stable diffusion would be a footnote at this point. Instead, dall-e is a joke and people who make art use stable diffusion, with casuals who just want some pretty looking pictures using midjourney.

Don’t count out Adobe Firefly. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s used more than all the other image gen models combined.

That might be true, but if you're using firefly as a juiced up content-aware fill in photoshop I'm not sure it's apples to apples.

No, ignoring laws and stealing data to increase your Castle's MOAT is the win. Compute isn't an open source solvable problem. I can't DirtyPCB's an A100

Making the argument open source is the answer is an agenda of making your competition spin wheels.

You're on a thread about how people are lambasting big money AI for being garbage, and producing inferior results to OSS tools you can run on consumer GPUS, tell me again how unbeatable google/other big tech players are.

I've been part of the advertising and marketing world for a lot of these companies for a decade plus, I've helped them sell bullshit. I've also been at the start of the AI journey, I've downloaded and checked local models of all promises and variances.

To say they're better than the compute that OpenAI or Google are throwing at the problem is just plain wrong.

I left the ad industry the moment I realised my skills and talents are better used informing people than lying to them.

This thread is not at all comparing the ethical issues of AI with local anything. You're conflating your solution with another problem.

Is a $5 can opener better than a $2000 telescope at opening cans? Yes. Is stable diffusion better at producing finished art, by virtue of not being closed off and DEI'd to oblivion so that it can actually be incorporated into workflows? Emphatically yes.

It doesn't matter how fancy your engineering is and how much money you have if you're too stupid to build the right product.

As for this being written nonsense, that's the sort of thing someone who couldn't find an easy way to win an argument and was bitter about the fact would say.

> Where do we go from here?

opensource models and training sets. So basically the "secret sauce" minus the hardware. I don't see it happening voluntarily.

I see it as not unlikely that there'll be a campaign to sigmatize, if not outright ban, open source models on the grounds of "safety". I'm quite surprised at how relatively unimpeded the distribution of image generation models has been, so far

What you're predicting has already started. Two weeks ago Geoffrey Hinton gave a speech advocating banning open source AI models (see e.g.: https://thelogic.co/news/ai-cant-be-slowed-down-hinton-says-... ).

I'm surprised there wasn't an HN thread about it at the time.

This is already happening, actually, although the focus so far has been on the possibility of their use for CSAM:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/12/paedophiles-...

Absolutely it won't. We've armed the issue with a supersonic jet engine and we're assuming if we build a slingshot out of pop sticks we'll somehow catch up and knock it off course.

i can't predict the future but there is precedent. Models, weights, and dataasets are the keys to the kingdom like operating system kernels, databases, and libraries use to be. At some point, enough people decided to re-invent and release these things or functionality to all that it became a self-sustaining community and, eventually, transformative to daily life. On the other hand, there may be enough people in power who came from and understand that community to make sure it never happens again.

No, compute is keys to the kingdom. The rest are assets and ammunition. You out-compute your enemy, you out-compute your competition. That's the race. The data is part of the problem, not the root.

These companies are silo'ing the worlds resources. GPU, Finance, Information. Those combined are the weapon. You make your competition starve in the dust.

These companies are pure evil pushing an agenda of pure evil. OpenAI is closed. Google is Google. We're like, ok, there you go! Take it all. No accountability, no transparency, we trust you.

Compute lets you fuck up a lot when trying to build a model, but you need data to do anything worth fucking up in the first place, and if you have 20% of the compute but you fuck up 1/5th as much you're doing fine.

Meta/OpenAI/Google can fuck up a lot because of all their compute, but ultimately we learn from that as the scientists doing the research at those companies would instantly bail if they couldn't publish papers on their techniques to show how clever they are.

I never said each of these exist in a vacuum. It is the collation of all that is the danger. This isn't democratic. This is companies now toying with governmental ideologies.

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