StabilityAI releases Stable Diffusion 3.5 | Hacker News Reader

StabilityAI releases Stable Diffusion 3.5

tomsguide.com

84 pointss-gonzales98 comments

This model seems to be largely uncensored, at least compared to previous releases. For example, it is surprisingly familiar with the physics of interactions between human skin and yogurt. According to a friend who was testing it on replicate.com. I would never prompt for something like that of course.

... go on..

Yes, please continue. What else did your friend tell you?

This is truly horrendous, some people say that it can generate a woman lying in the grass!

> For example, it is surprisingly familiar with the physics of interactions between human skin and yogurt.

Well, that's a niche one.

I noticed the last few months that in several subreddits that have nothing to do with tech, the sentiment had shifted very negatively regarding AI art. Some subs straight up ban those images. No reason given.

It seems the mainstream view is grounded in anxiety and dislike for tech. This isn’t shared by my friends who enjoy tech at all.

Have others here been experiencing this?

It is not solely due to dislike of tech but rather the copyrights being violated and artists losing revenue to it.

> It seems the mainstream view is grounded in anxiety and dislike for tech.

No, you're barking up the wrong tree here. I love tech, I work in the industry and intend to continue to do so. I hate AI art because it's just bad. It's awful. AI produces images that don't make physical sense, have a weird glossy "digital art" sheen and most of all have zero artistic merit. I only want to see art (and read text) produced by human beings.

>I hate AI art because it's just bad. It's awful. AI produces images that don't make physical sense

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

I take it you dislike Escher as well then

AI is just a tool in the box for humans to take advantage of. You can do bad and good stuff with it (most art is bad regardless of the tool). This is my fav video series that heavily uses AI tools (images, video, audio, lip sync):

https://x.com/neuralviz/status/1848176393282326595

I enjoy it and I think has tons of artistic merit

> AI produces images that don't make physical sense

Der Kuss is an oil-on-canvas painting with added gold leaf, silver and platinum. It is widely praised and held in high regard.

To me, it looks like the man has a broken neck, and the woman's been decapitated, her head rotated 90° and reattached to her torso by the ear.

This isn't to say that AI art is flawless on the first go — just that quite a lot of famous "good" art has exactly that specific flaw too.

Even though GenAI is getting better, and even though competent users know how to work around this with the right kinds of effort, normal people don't study the thing they want to get an image of before asking an AI to make it for them, and therefore will generally fail to notice when the image they've just made is still very wrong at at least one entire layer of abstraction about how the things it's depicting function or relate to each other.

An overwhelming majority of the kind of "art" people are producing with these Slop Generators is supposed to make physical sense - it just doesn't.

Have a look at the dreck in the linked article. The software was not asked to produce a picture of an impossible waterfall that couldn't exist in our physical world. Everything about the prompt indicates the user was looking for a physically real scene. The picture of the girl in a meadow even used hashtags to indicate to the algorithm that it was expected to produce an instagram-like photo, but there's a seed pod floating in mid air, her dress is missing a critical strap, the lacework of the dress doesn't make sense and the direction of lighting is totally inconsistent across different parts of her figure.

None of which contradicts my point, that the output's flaws are things the users themselves don't notice.

For example:

> The software was not asked to produce a picture of an impossible waterfall that couldn't exist in our physical world.

And, given my lack of knowledge of waterfall geology, I have no idea why that's impossible.

> her dress is missing a critical strap

Her left shoulder? I've seen real dresses where one of those slips off sideways for whatever reason. It's like the dress version of self-opening flies.

If you meant something else, I missed it.

I do see the seed pod; but (perhaps due to so many photographers using fill lighting or photoshop, I don't know) I see nothing wrong with the lighting.

I see nothing noteworthy about the lacework either, but I wouldn't expect to as a guy whose total knowledge of things like that is "they are often intricate and frilly".

There are oftentimes things I can indeed spot in GenAI images, when I make them I often find it best to make four at a time, pick the one that was closest to what I wanted, then highlight the errors and do img2img for another cycle, for a dozen repetitions, to get what I want.

But most people don't look that closely.

It's like this: https://xkcd.com/1015/

It's just a young audience. They've always been very impressionable. When the iPad came out Reddit was all about "This is it? More like MaxiPad, amirite?! Lol what a marketing idiot" and "it's just 4 iPhones taped together lol" etc. etc.

Online commenters are frequently not very different from an army of LLMs talking to each other. They get stuck on a few points and keep repeating them.

You can pay attention to them if you like, but take a quick stop on /r/relationshipadvice or /r/amitheasshole and you'll find out what the audience actually is. And then you can ask yourself: does these people's opinion matter to me? Do I want to be like them?

As a glass half full guy, I appreciate Reddit and CNN/Fox comment sections for compartmentalizing all of these people away from the rest of us.

Good. Every time I see AI "art" it's just someone with the worst taste spewing their slop everywhere. It drowns out actually good art.

The people who can are leaving the internet and moving to using AI models. The people left are the ones who don't know how, or have a bone to pick with them.

As an example I've not had to use google for a knowledge search in months now. Perplexity is much better, both for a summary of what I'm looking for, and for finding non-garbage links.

So you use it to get links back to the internet. I expect the non-garbage links part won't last long, in the AI age.

The part of the internet that was not-garbage was always the part run by volunteers. Screening the number of people who visit those sites preserves them since the volunteers don't need to interact with the self entitled masses.

That clickfarms will die is no great loss.

I am seriously concerned about who will generate new content when everyone is interacting with the internet with AI crawlers.

The same people who wrote the original wikipedia articles before power mods locked them out.

> Perplexity is much better, both for a summary of what I'm looking for, and for finding non-garbage links.

So AI can summarize the news for you. But how does it do it? It steals the news from actual people and organizations. We're all selfish beings who want to save time and/or effort but what do you think happens to Perplexity if it had no access to news organizations? What's the end outcome here?

By this logic if you are commenting on anything you haven't paid for you are stealing. Even if it's published openly on the Internet and you don't have to pay to access it.

Did you pay for all the content you used to create your comment? If not how did you dare to write it and publish it?

You've stolen the fraction of their income because after reading your comment I don't need to go read your source if I'm only interested in information you stolen and shared.

What if you cause the demise of those sources with your (and your copycats) shameless theft?

This is silly. Technology evolves all the time. Things die and they should die. Other arise in their place to fill the gap.

Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?

Morals aside, AI will run into serious problems in 10-20 years when the world has rearranged itself around AI content. With less non-AI content available and no reliable way to differentiate AI vs non-AI content, there will no longer be a dataset to train against.

Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly, but AI summarizing every news article is a problem on a whole different scale. Basically the same as the difference between getting a mosquito bite and being stabbed in your carotid artery - both are just blood loss, but one is a minor annoyance and the other is fatal.

If news agencies still had reporters that would be a problem.

They haven't since the 1980s.

Everything that you say as some sort of doom and gloom prediction about the future _is the world we've lived in for the last 40 years_.

This no reporter argument is so false but gets repeated often. If I only read internet articles from internet media companies you might have a little bit of a point, but actual newspapers have actual journalists. Some might be good and some might be bad, but they do employ people that do more than build an article around a tweet.

Here's a random newspaper that you're saying doesn't have reporters: https://www.tampabay.com

> Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?

Then the AI will go to the primary sources that the human journalist currently go to.

Will it be flawed? Yes.

Are humans already? Also yes.

Is there a huge risk that "the algorithm" will be politically biased? Totally.

Can you name one press organisation, larger than a local one-city-only paper, that hasn't been accused of that?

> Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?

It will evolve towards consuming more raw data and more information that people self publish to produce news. Newslike narration constructed on actual factual information is so bland and repeatable that there is no need for more training material. News is so uncreative and predictable that I can pick up a newspaper in language I don't know and still guess with high probability what most articles are about from photos, common names and few words of that language that I do know and general tone.

> Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly,

There are so many humans doing that that the effect is not negligible. I skip reading all paywalled articles and read just their comments instead.

What's silly is your argument. You're comparing a person commenting on a forum to a service designed to serve millions a summary of someone else's work that's also powered by billions of dollars.

Technology certainly evolves but this is a shitty direction. You yourself are calling the service you use shameless theft. Perplexity themselves have been caught doing shady things. I'm not here trying to defend media companies but I'm saying the current end game here is not pretty and more people should consider that.

I'm comparing millions of such persons to AI. Internet was supposed to be a demise of newspapers and to a degree it is. AI is just the same thing. Hard to tell if it'll be any better or worse.

> By this logic if you are commenting on anything you haven't paid for you are stealing.

Can you expand on this? Because I'm not following the flow of your logic AT ALL.

Your brain isn't magic, you learn from experience.

AI isn't magic, it learns from experience.

If the inputs used to train an AI are "stealing", why aren't the inputs (experiences, what you read, what you listen to) to your brain?

And I don't mean in the reductive sense of "you are a human and the AI is not" I mean the act and the process and the result are the same, what differs is the substrate and the architecture — proton exchange across lipid layers vs. electron flow across doped semiconductors for the former, and transformers vs. the evolved chemical mess of the human brain for the latter.

If AI training company needs to train only on materials that they paid for the copyright of and never on materials that are just publicly available on the Internet then a person should have the same obligation. What you read influences what you create. If AI company trained on publicly available texts that it didn't pay for can't publish AI creations then a person who trained themselves on information they haven't paid for a license to shouldn't be allowed to publish anything either.

Ongoing copyright issues notwithstanding, it's because 99% of the mainstream usage of generative art, generative music, generative LLMs is noise. And sure, noise existed before but things like Suno and Midjourney amplify the issue by an exponential factor.

It crowds out the people who genuinely devote thought, skill and time into their creations.

Particularly on platforms like Reddit, to OPs point about the sentiment on there, because they're so prone to being overwhelmed by low quality AI content if it's not kept under control (which usually means the subreddit banning AI posts with no exceptions). Ranking systems like Reddits require user engagement to work, and most users don't want to engage with a never-ending firehose of MidJourney slop to the extent required to separate the signal from the noise.

The tendency for people to spam AI images in contexts devoted to sharing images of real stuff is particularly irritating.

Yep, subreddits like /r/cosplay had to add rules strictly banning AI images despite it being blatantly obvious that they're against the whole point of the sub. People spam AI anyway unless the moderators intervene to delete it and ban repeat offenders.

Art has been an extremely saturated field even before transformers showed up.

So AI art has reached Jazz stage.

The closest corollary in programming may be AI-generated pull requests on github.

Trying to pad a resume with open source "contributions" and trying to pad a Patreon with "fanart" are behaviors that come from the same headspace, I think.

>sentiment had shifted very negatively regarding AI art.

See the drama around the baby peacock search. The results were not only AI filled but objectively entirely wrong. I'd link you to said drama but I literally can't find it because search is just picking up an echo chamber of AI. Which in a way is pretty meta commentary in itself.

I appreciate the ability to generate images of whatever I want. I don't like the way it's messing with perception of reality in a world which we view largely through screens.

>dislike for tech. This isn’t shared by my friends who enjoy tech at all.

Are they in tech or in the creative space. People I know in creative spaces are anxious while those in the tech space tend to be mixed (doomer vs AI utopia split)

Publications have had a very negative tilt since GPT4 showed up. It's no surprise since LLM's are clearly an existential threat to them.

Transformers are also a very real existential threat to artists, as the vast majority can only ever have a decent career "working for the man", which is ultimately run by business people who could care less about AI generated material if it dramatically reduces cost while being effectively identical.

Eh, different bubbles of people I think. My tech-loving friends (including me), aren't fan of AI art because how low effort everything is. Some funny memes, but even then you get used to them and move on. It was definitely "cool" when it came out, but if it's simple still images, icons, and etc., they're kinda meh, at least for me. What Adobe did with the rotation tool is pretty cool, and if we start seeing effects of such AI art, that would be a bit different. But again, it has to be used in a specific way to inspire anyone.

I'm actually curious what the people around you find cool about AI art. Nothing has "awed" me in the past 16 months, I would say.

“Awed” is a big word. I’ve been awed by art only a handful of times in my life. I start to see people using AI in ways I find enjoyable and interesting.

Below my fav video series that heavily uses AI (images, video, lip sync, sound). I enjoy it and I think it has artistic merit

https://x.com/dmarcos/status/1848835003079397646

It’s done by a single person. Individuals will be able to make stuff that needed teams and large budgets before. It will allow for much more creative risks.

It's.... awful. It's mostly just a slideshow of very AI-generated-looking art with some weird-enough looking aliens to not fall into the uncanny valley. The lip sync is not even close.

Fair if you don't like it. I find it interesting, enjoyable and many other people too. The author would not have been able to create something like that without AI. We're in year two and stuff only gonna get better.

The counter point is, if it makes it so easy to make it, it’s just… meh. We get used to things extremely fast.

Even in traditional art. The Black Square was revolutionary in its specific way, but the copycats aren’t talked about.

I think the AI Seinfeld will be remembered for a while, but random spin offs will be forgotten. Just like how Twitch Plays Pokemon was huge, but follow ups got forgotten. AI art will need to find uniqueness angle at each step, because the complexity aspect will never be there.

The video above is not easy. AI is automation. A lot of what required a large team and budget before can be done by individuals or small teams. To do something good still requires skill, talent and dedication. The bar of what it's noteworthy raises. Creators that can harness the new tools in unique ways will create the new Seinfields and Pokemons. I'm excited for example that 3D animation movies a la Pixar won't be exclusively produced by multi-billion dollar companies. Small studios or even individuals can participate and the lower costs will allow for much more creative risk.

Like again, I get what you’re saying, and I agree with it. But my point was, once everyone can generate Pixar-quality movies, they will simply lose the appeal. Maybe it should be that way, maybe it shouldn’t, but crowded market just desensitizes people and makes them shrug.

There will be winner-takes-it-all productions, and that’ll come mostly from the companies with the highest marketing budgets.

The biggest uphill battle that AI content creation companies will have to fight is kind of societal. They’ll need to change public’s perception that AI=“low effort”.

Yeah, in some places it gets dismissed as "low effort posts". Even if they otherwise accept scribbles on lined paper by people who clearly don't have so much as high-school art.

The vast majority of people I know who dislike AI art (including myself) are people who love tech, but hate how this tech has been trained on the art of human artists without credit or compensation… and then on top of that it’s being used to replace those artists and reduce their job prospects! It’s easy to see why this sucks if you take a step back.

AI art is just art. Most is bad (same as without AI). AI is just another tool in the toolbox. Shared link below in a different comment. My fav video series that heavily uses AI (images, video, lip sync, sound). I enjoy it and I think it has artistic merit

https://x.com/dmarcos/status/1848835003079397646

Even with AI, one needs talent and skill to create something noteworthy. Just the standard of what’s compelling will change. I think people capable to adapt to the new tech will do fine creatively and financially.

>AI art is just art

Not necessarily. You need to define "art" and most likely "creativity". As you have said AI is a tool, I assume you're not anthropomorphising the model itself as an artistic being.

So it's down to creativity/skill. I would say someone saying "create me an image of a person on a lake" has no creativity/skill at all. It may be an image, or a drawing, but it's not art. In the same way I can draw a stick person - it's a drawing without creativity/skill, so it's just a drawing, not art.

To make the most of AI tools you need to understand how they work. Just prompting to me is just like using clipart or stock images. For interesting stuff people are doing search for ComfyUI tutorials on YouTube. It's a skill as like in any other digital art tool.

I agree that AI can be used to make real art, but that's not the issue at hand. None of that addresses the argument I made, that it was trained on the work of real human artists without compensation, and will be used to replace many of the jobs of those same artists.

I'd assume because it's spam; it has made producing low-quality crap practically free, leading to the whole internet being flooded with it. See the notorious baby peacock, for instance.

Does Stable Diffusion 3.5 make Stable Diffusion 3 obsolete?

There are quite a few different versions (SD1.5, XL, XL Turbo, SD3) of Stable Diffusion still in use because the newer ones didn't definitively supersede previous versions.

It's offtopic, but I hate articles which talk about a very specific thing and put dozens of links into the text, but none links to the actual product or company.

That's to reduce bounce rate and keep you on the page for the ads. Notice that all the hyperlinks are same domain. Yes, it's annoying.

The stuff: https://github.com/Stability-AI/sd3.5#stable-diffusion-35

Also relevant: https://github.com/huggingface/blog/blob/main/sd3-5.md

Yeah, I feel like articles like this shouldn't be posted, but instead the link to the source.

News by StabilityAI: https://stability.ai/news/introducing-stable-diffusion-3-5

> Prompt: a brave explorer standing on the edge of a massive waterfall, overlooking a vast, untouched jungle. The explorer is wearing a worn leather jacket and carrying an old map, as the mist from the waterfall rises around them. A glowing golden temple is barely visible in the distance, hidden among the trees.

Result: an explorer not standing on the edge of a waterfall, but instead a physically impossible waterfall in the distance. A glowing temple is very very very visible, totally unhidden by any trees.

How does it compare to FLUX?

My self-hosted Krita plugin is running on SD1.5 and SDXL and those are already very impressive albeit "dated" by the standards of October 2024. So I can't wait to try this out!

It looks good and all but it won’t past any visual tests when you go more than 10 seconds vs even hobbyist vids. There is still a big gap if it does longer durations

Given how badly sd3 flopped, curious if this is better.

Kind of amazing how these releases went from, the most mind blowing thing ever, to basically, meh, in a few months.

Flagged for the website getting an advertisement past ublock origin.

They chose to illustrate the article with a picture of a woman lying on grass, with one hand hidden and the other with 6 fingers? That's either a very self-aware or completely unaware choice.

Wait am i counting wrong?

No, you do count 5 fingers, with 5 knuckle joints. Assuming she has a thumb, that makes 6 fingers though.

I am really quite shocked that people don't seem to recognize a hand. The thumb's metacarpal comes out basically from the base of the wrist, and its distal phalanx would end about where the proximal phalanx of the other fingers start. So the only way this hand would be somewhat anatomically correct would be that the thumb is hidden by the perspective.

Oh man you’re right I totally missed that. If that were a thumb, it would have to be some disgusting dinosaur claw thing because it’s way too far down the arm. That’s subtle, I bet they actually missed it.

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