Can't believe Stable Diffusion is out for public use and that's considered “OK”
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
If Google made something dangerous, well, I don't trust Google at all. I'd rather have it in the open so I know what I'm dealing with. (I know Stable Diffusion isn't a google product, I'm using it as a neutral-ish example.)
But also, what dangers are we talking about? "The model produces something racist" is not _dangerous_ to anyone, it means the model needs work to make it not do racist things. Wouldn't public release help with that?
What am I missing?
Is the knife a murderer or the person who wields it?
What I disagree with is the idea that it means we can learn nothing from or should not disseminate the model. We need to correct our mistakes!
And also, maybe we need a model that can identify racist content if we want to identify racist content better?
I could easily gather a corpus of racist slogans, a corpus of racist images, and smash them together to get a few thousand racist memes. It would probably take less time than relying on an AI model to generate each one (which takes a few seconds to a few minutes each).
And it's not as though there aren't millions of actual racists out there spewing out racist content constantly anyway.
While this is "true", the sense in which it is true is so limited as to be entirely unhelpful. If you manufacture P, and you know Q may be an outcome, why are you manufacturing P, and how are you preventing Q?
* Where, as we all know, Q is usually "kill" or "harm", and P might be "guns" or "autonomous vehicles" or "military robots" or "facial recognition" etc.
Perhaps it was just my overly convoluted writing style? :) If though it was about the content...
The statement "P doesn't Q people, people Q people" is absolutely devoid of any useful information or novel insight, and doesn't take the conversation in a new direction that is useful. In fact, it can kick the conversation into an anti-productive quagmire.
Let's see... "Stable Diffusion doesn't produce racist memes, people produce racist memes." Well duh. A more useful conversation might be about how we protect against possible automated mass-generation of racist messages (or whatever), what roles SD et al have to play, how we deal with possible outcomes, etc etc.
For what it's worth, I do not think Stable Diffusion should be kept under wraps. Paradigm-shifting technology should be discussed in the open. Developers/engineers should be prepared to walk away from anything with a significant downside if that downside hasn't been exposed to thorough debate. And we should be prepared to shoulder responsibility when shiny new toys are used to do terrible things.
Are you presuming everyone reading and responding to this thread are on your level of interpretation or analytical superiority? This is the first time reading about "P doesn't Q people, people Q people" on HN and I imagine won't be the last. There is no "In fact," here and it already rubbed off as a completely pretentious statement, which given the circumstances is not unusual in a place like this.
(I didn't downvote you but am expecting a downvote)
> Is the knife a murderer or the person who wields it?
I attempted to abstract that, to make my response impersonal. The archetype is based on a phrase well known in some countries, but certainly not all (my apologies for making assumptions): "guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Another reason I avoided that specific sentence was to avoid the strong emotions it invokes.
About what I wrote starting "In fact...", the sentences following that were my attempt to expand the point about quagmires.
Oh well. Thanks for the response anyway! :)
In the meantime, a ton of people who just don't know or care about the issues will build products on top of this really cool thing which, because those problems haven't yet been fixed, harm people.
The only answers I can think of require us to use the model for unethical things - like profiling people at the airport or something. That would be abjectly wrong for lots of reasons even if the model itself were fine.
If you use the model to make images to use creatively, well, there's always a human deciding what images to use. Also, "I saw a racist picture" doesn't rise to a level of harm where I feel like we have to pump the brakes.
So I still feel like I'm missing something.
That kind of harm is just too dilute to justify this approach to me, especially given all the ethical concerns that exist if you force the model to stay only in the hands of its creators and make them its gatekeepers. (Bearing in mind that the creators of the model are a for-profit corporation, not a bunch of AI ethicists.)
And again, I support improving the model so it doesn't generate racist (or any other -ist) content. I just think that improvement, and indeed all work on the model, is better done in the open.
If none of my images from Stable Diffusion contain black people, that's not a big deal (I mostly don't even ask it for people, because it's not that good at them).
If none of the images from Stable Diffusion or any of its brethren contain black people, that's a problem, especially if we start using these sorts of tools to generate art for things like games, book illustrations/covers, etc....but even if we don't; even if it's just a bunch of people playing around with them on the Internet. Not seeing yourself in media, even this kind of media, does a kind of harm that it's very hard for us "normal" (white, cis, straight, male, etc—and yes, I am all of those) people to fully grasp.
From my point of view, most of these folks would have to be deluding themselves the moment they apply for the job, or incredibly ignorant of google's past.
Google's problem is not a lack of seriousness per se, it's that they seem to be stuck in a downward spiral of hard-left blank slateism that views the general public not as humans but as an unwashed mass whose brains are basically empty EEPROMs waiting to be flashed through the eyeballs. Whilst they are elite and super-smart and can handle AI, everyone else would be immediately converted into drooling zombies.
So they've got stuck in this pattern that goes like:
1. OpenAI announce some cool new model that does something neat, invites friends and says open version will come later when they make it "safe", read: ideologically pure. When eventually released it's broken by the hacks they put in to try and meet their ill defined requirements e.g. see how "cowboy with a cat" got turned into a picture of an Asian woman but worked with cowgirls.
2. Google immediately release a web page stating that they were already doing that, and their version is better in every way, but it's far too dangerous to release. As a consequence nobody can verify their claims and their stuff is just ignored.
3. Eventually a mishmash of third parties duplicate the works based on their papers and make public stuff with it that isn't garbled by filtering. Sky proceeds to not fall. Google/OpenAI learn nothing. GOTO 1.
This pattern happened with text transformer models, it happened with DALL-E, there are probably other examples too. For some reason AI researchers at these places believe that whilst Word / Photoshop / Blender / a painting easel is anodyne and safe technology, a tech that does the same thing more conveniently is a revolutionary social crisis in a box. No evidence for their beliefs on this matter is ever presented, because it's all based on ideological assumptions about human nature that are taken as axiomatic.
Very sad. Google could be a leader in this space. Instead they've disappeared into a hole, terrified of the world outside.
So, just the ramblings of a random person on the internet. Nothing to see here.
She may work in the field, but that's just her opinion, not some technical insight, and she is not talking in the name of her company. Her opinion is as good as mine, or yours, or the guy I met at the bar last night. I fact, I think it is a bit disingenuous for her to mention her employer in her Twitter profile, it may get her in trouble.
Now, if Google follows up, it may have some value.
The New Testament is itself a product of the Church: the latter existed well before the former took its shape or before even quill was put to paper.
Therefore, it took members of the Church to write down these doctrines, and also leaders of same Church to discern and rule which writings were orthodox, and which were heretical, mere decades after Christ's ascension.
"Different churches" have been founded more or less continuously, and the 1517 splits where people tended to follow politically- motivated renegade priests, bishops, and monarchs are not really isolated from the narrative of Church history itself.
You're right that different churches have been appearing continuously since the beginning of Christianity, but access to the text of the Bible in vernacular did fuel the Reformation. How could people build a "personal relationship" with God if they don't have direct access to his words?
And practically all learned people - all the movers and shakers (so to speak) of the Reformation - understood Latin really well. About as well as the Hellenic world understood Koine Greek in the Apostolic Age. So they already had direct access to both Scripture and Tradition (chiefly being the sacred liturgy in Latin) and the Eastern Orthodox already actively translated the latter into vernaculars.
We can have nice things just once, and that's ok.
Yeah, researchers and big companies could have "properly tested and audited" it for a while before release, but then what? Is Google an expert on what is ethical to give to the public? No, they're clearly only worried about profits, reputation, brand image, so yeah preventing nazis from using your tools is a valid concern to Google et al., but not to us. Online nazis are already doing their nazi things, just not with their latest tool.
> It's not about who should regulate technology, it's about who can.
Corps getting upset that their attempts to regulate technology without the consent of anyone should not get upset when others undermine their efforts.
another interesting longform statement on this topic
I would have hoped for a much more reasoned and logically sound argument from a professional researcher.
Looking forward to Stable Diffusion 1.5!
Reality is that AI features rarely replace anyone but amplify the individual that can incorporate it in their skillset.
The best option would be if models like Imagan, Dall-E and Midjourney all followed this open principle, as each of the approaches has its strengths and weaknesses and could potentially learn from each other to improve.
The statement is so ridiculous I thought at first that she meant that it is not "ok" but "amazing".
Think about it this way - you want the highest quality AI development team you can get, so you hire everyone. Then you put the more "fringe-y" characters in a building by themselves, where you can let them tinker about and make ridiculous statements in public and not do any real harm, while the grown-ups actually get on with things.
The more people play with it, the more they are used to it and the less likely to be fooled by it. In addition, large corporations and nation states have the money and access to talent that they can build and train these models. Thus if you hide it, you are just making the technology more potent in the hands of the very people who have the most incentive to use it to manipulate people.
The state of affairs in open AI software (the concept) is shameful.
This might all ease up a little over the coming years, we now have both OpenXR, as well has hardware that is a lot more self-contained and no longer requires the PC to do so much work. But it will still take a while until a VR headset can 'just work' the same way a monitor does.
I don't understand why they even included content moderation. People will say it's to prevent public relations issues but that doesn't seem like a good justification, you shouldn't have to go out of your way to placate the ultra-puritanical. And the filter is trivial to remove so how is it anything but a facade?
She later elaborates that her concern is that the generator could be used to create fake photos of people, who could then be persecuted by using the photos as evidence.
https://twitter.com/negar_rz/status/1565246343769120769 (https://nitter.net/negar_rz/status/1565246343769120769)
Like, "Hey, I work at ExxonMobil, let me tell you how you eating that hamburger is destroying the planet"