nonbirithm

I feel like the backlash against Stable Diffusion had the opposite change in visibility. It revealed that thousands of people wanted a way to produce unique art in the styles of living artists, where some of those people might have gone to either their Patreon or a piracy site that scraped Patreon instead. Either way they're not as visible if they're only consuming the result.

To some artists, AI generated images from their styles would amount to "productive piracy." Unlike torrenting the act is often out in the open since users tend to share the results online. I'm not sure if this phenomenon has happened before; with teenagers pirating Photoshop it's impossible to tell from a glance if the output is from a pirated version.

Only anecdotal, but there may be cultural problems stemming from the flat structure at Valve that make organizing around products difficult. This video came out 4 years ago so I don't know if anything's changed since then, but it's one ex-employee's experience of their work culture at the time.

Basically he claims that even though there's a flat corporate structure within Valve, in practice an implicit management structure arose in which those with the most political clout controlled others without it. Plus they used stack ranking at the time.

https://youtu.be/41XgkLKYuic

Sounds like a good idea. Some recent Stable Diffusion toolkits like ComfyUI are modular so in theory you'd be able to build a pipeline like this inside the application instead of being constrained to one workflow.

The difference is that player pianos can only replay previously existing songs, while Midjourney can create something novel in under a minute. The problem that's being solved is not everyone wants to spend thousands of hours learning how to draw in order to have the (artistically competent) end product in their hands.

It's interesting how all the overblown controversy around violent video games decades ago can now actually be applied to social media in its current state. It was like some of the pundits were correct in forecasting the potential behavioral motivators from massively popular media, but were incorrect in the degree of harm. Video games with blood and gore were not able to cause upticks in violence, but being exposed to millions of people in one network can cause kids to show up with bruises to school.

I think it's the human factor. People aren't going to empathize with an avatar or 3D model the same way they do with a real person filming themselves with a smartphone. It makes me think that the real bar for extreme content in video games is having a politically opinionated theme, not just subtext (which no AAA studio would ever risk producing) with sufficient realism.

"Napster copyright lawsuits could be a legal earthquake for peer-to-peer file sharing"

I think the only effective way of slowing down AI isn't copyright enforcement, but trade secrets. If Midjourney can control who has access to its service and what kinds of content its users can generate, democratized models/piracy can do nothing to change that.

The reason why there's so much more interest in AI art than AI voice cloning is that there's not yet a publicly available AI voice model with good enough performance. When that model is released or leaked there will be a similar panic around the effectiveness of modern AI voice tools, because anyone good or bad can get their hands on them without being forced to go through the company's content filter.

Sounds like a "color of bits" issue. In practice the courts would care about where the latent coordinates originated from, and if it were only possible to derive them from violation of copyright. Same issue with a copy of Titanic ripped from a decaying VHS and compressed into a bad quality AVI uploaded on a torrent tracker. At some point there's still an issue with unauthorized reproduction even if the bits don't match the master copy, because the "color" would still match. And "color" is not a thing that can be represented with data, it's abstract information.

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Managing everyone's impression of you is how I understand you're supposed to make friends. If you don't fit in with a group then they'll stop wanting to be around you and you'll no longer have them to talk to. Arguably having a single friend is similar to the idea of being part of an exclusive club without the pointless vanity; on the contrary it's a critically important factor for not going insane from isolation. The tradeoff for receiving that benefit is you have to acknowledge their wants and needs instead of always acting in your own interest, and coexist with them peacefully.

Not so much about the danger, but Japanese culture is much different from the US; being a collectivist society there is immense pressure on each person to do the right thing. Anyone who doesn't fit in can suffer immense social consequences. This is instilled at a societal level, so that is one reason that everything is so clean, there is not as much danger, etc., but it comes with its own downsides.

Are mainstream Linux distros as user-friendly to a 10-year-old as the other two operating systems, even if the latter are more anti-consumer? As the article states the author was trying to set up a first-time computer for his son. Which flavor of Linux to install is clearly an important factor for such an audience, as it makes distros like Arch out of the question.

> that is mostly a feature because we have found out that the alternative is even worse

This is the actual problem, that we've been trained to think that there are no consequences to trying everything ever and we will always be able to pick ourselves up after failure, until one day we find we can't anymore.

Sadly this line of thinking does apply to a lot of personal problems. People often say that you can't always succeed, that you can only move forward with failures under your belt to have first-hand experience of what not to do. That we have to experience failure first in order to stop ourselves from making bad decisions, otherwise we remain clueless.

But the stakes are so much higher at this scale, and the damage can become irreparable with a single mistake. It's to the point where we take as a given that people will just keep pressing on, without even exploring the reasons why we do, and why it's inevitable.

Pure ridiculous speculation: If needing to see the experience of destroying ourselves is necessary to stop us from destroying ourselves, a kind of weird theory has been floating around in my head related to that. Civilizations on the brink of collapse after they've moved too fast and broke themselves for the last time scrounge together their collective knowledge and shoot it off into space so that future civilizations can interpret them. Preferably in a way that makes encountering the time capsule seem like the word of some deity. The following civilizations would treat it as the word of God to prevent their own collapse, without the hard evidence of experimenting with <AI, etc.,> to the point where they cannot resist developing it into an unstoppable superweapon.

It would be like the golden record on the Voyager, except instead of communicating "we exist, and here's what our planet is like", it would go more like "we exist, and here's how to not end up like us."

And similarly, FLoC was invented for the sole purpose of making targeted advertising look legitimate.

I have a feeling a lot of these models take advantage of in-built language pattern-matching to which we can't help but ascribe meaning. A puppy can't help but chase a laser pointer because his prey drive compels him to. Likewise there will always be people who take this kind of chatbot output at face value because the signals resemble empathy well enough. Not everyone is a game theorist or has an opinion about AI alignment/effects one way or another, and they will be presented with this tech they won't care to question.

I agree with you, but the difference between being able to tell someone "if you need to install some dependencies in Rust, just use Cargo" and show them the documentation, and whatever the equivalent documentation is in Python are worlds apart. I think the author's argument would be weaker if he focused on a language other than Python that doesn't have a hellscape of a package ecosystem.

And I remember custom build scripts with Cargo being a major pain at the time I used it, but the Cargo developers were able to sidestep major fundamental problems because they knew what didn't work with packaging in the decades before and managed to think about the design carefully enough from the start.

Rust is different because the choice of package manager is "simply" Cargo, not necessarily that Cargo itself is trivial to use.

With the sheer brokenness of Python packaging I wish that the Python 2->3 transition had been between two completely different languages, such that the entire thing could have been thrown away. Yet because there was breakage, but not enough breakage to amount to moving towards a better rewrite, nobody's ever going to attempt a true Python 4. They blew their chance.

Now we have a never ending train of hotshot developers that think they can "solve" Python packaging with another tool, without realizing that you can't design a tool to fix a broken 15-year-old system. It's not just a "there are now X competing standards" issue, it's also the fact that anyone who makes an earnest attempt is doomed. They will never be able to get it past the point of universally good enough.

I lament the fact that I'm dragged back into the Python ecosystem every time I need to do something with a PyTorch-based tool someone spent years of effort building. I would never recommend the language to a newcomer. Ruby pollutes the global namespace, and Gemfiles execute arbitrary code, but at least with Ruby there's Gem, and then there's Bundler, and nobody complains.

Will we forever be beholden to the mistaken decisions of the original developers in the early 90's, just because Python is simply too widespread? Because even people like me who detest the packaging experience are forced to go back there because nobody's going to rewrite the hottest ML project in Elixir or something? Even the simple mistakes like putting venv files in Scripts/ instead of bin/ forcing one to work around it in cross-platform CI make no sense in hindsight. Nobody remembers why it was made that way after so long. Now it just floats over you like a spectre.

Yeah, have to wonder how many people, if they had the money, would want to buy out Twitter just to wipe it out. Doesn't a huge chunk of HN hate Twitter and wish it were dead?

(Regardless I think that would be useless in the long run, since the millions of stranded users will still want another Twitter-like platform. And Twitter imploding without a designated archive will wipe out a tremendous amount of digital history.)

A lot of his decisions look pretty incompetent in the surface, like how could he not see how charging for verification devalue the system to whoever has the money?

Instead it could just be an intentional ploy to completely devalue Twitter disguised as incompetence. He can justify firing employees and charging for API access/verification as money-saving strategies, even if they're terrible strategies that have little chance of succeeding. And he could make enough people believe he's an idiot who makes things up as he goes rather than someone specifically driven or apathetic enough to run Twitter into the ground. Not to mention he was forced to buy them after changing his mind. Almost feels like a "so that's what happens" response.

I wonder how higher powers would be able to distinguish fake incompetence from real incompetence. Would they care how Twitter as a private company ends up if it's the case that it implodes from its own legitimately bad business decisions? It reminds me of how employers won't directly fire employees for discriminatory reasons, instead they make the employees' lives miserable so they're compelled to leave on their own, thus they escape scrutiny.

I can maybe sense some foresight that we didn't have at the time other world-changing technologies were discovered. People reference the printing press often in relation to the arguments against progress, but I haven't seen discussion about the internal combustion engine yet, which hundreds of years later we're now hoping we can replace with EVs because of their unforseen consequences. Books don't have the same impact, especially with paperless formats becoming commonplace. Would we have reacted to the ICE hundreds of years ago the same way some are reacting to AI, that it needs to be stopped or limited to prevent the destruction of $entity, if there had been enough knowledge about how tech can affect e.g. the environment, or the world in general?

There was nothing in place to stop us from taking the tradeoff of transportation efficiency over the at the time unknown negative effects. But should we call the invention of the ICE and other related technologies a mistake that irreparably doomed the planet and our future generations? I have no idea. It's a tough question we were incapable of asking at the time, and might reveal some hard truths about the nature of progress and the price we have to pay for it. At least with the effects known at this point, we can start asking it, and it's a step up from obliviousness.

This has been repeated often, but even if it's true, I have to wonder why it's treated as a given with no further exploration. Is it because we as a species will inevitably accept any technological progress once sometime after it's been discovered, before the consequences can be suffered? What will that imply for any other species intelligent enough to get to where we are?

The kinds of theories I mull over tend to delve into the realm of speculative fiction more often than not. The comments section here feels like it could be replicated in the opening chapters of such a novel. We might never know if the speculation pans out before it's too late.

I think he means globalization. All those cultures were probably homogeneous to some extent in their own isolated bubbles. The thing that changed was near-instant global communication. When most people in each society had full visibility into the standards/cultures of other societies, their definitions of an ideal society converged based on the new information.

Even if all the jobs creating CRUD apps are automated away, there will probably still be an interest in automating them even faster. LLMs are currently the state of the art technique for doing so, hence there will be a continual need for more AI engineers/researchers.

And if something that performs better than current LLMs comes around, all those engineers will shift over to whatever field develops them.

It wouldn't be surprising with millions of people's mindsets already conditioned by the convenience of an abundance of content, that if they're handed a piece of tech that can generate it personalized to their preferences in a more efficient manner that cuts humans out of the loop, there's nothing stopping a lot of them from using it.

Maybe what was needed was a wider understanding of media literacy and the creator's mindset, the idea that even the most tasteless and bland porn video in existence could only have possibly been brought about because humans were behind the camera shots, the acting, the production, even if they were all terrible at their jobs. Nobody cared to think about those people until now because a lot of content comes off as disposable, even with a team of humans behind it, and well-poisoning AI was relegated to jokes about Skynet.

We never considered the idea that something other than a human could also create such a thing, and at a comparable level of quality. It was an unwritten rule of creativity for centuries until generative tech made it blisteringly obvious.

Maybe "I don't need to be a chef to appreciate the food" will be rewritten in the coming years. Maybe as, "but the chef needs to be human for the food to connect."

You can promote those values, but all it takes is one person that doesn't operate by the same ethical system as you to invalidate everything. In the case of MAD that means the annihilation of the world. The more people the technology spreads to, the more chances it has to fall into one of those hands. And unfortunately, those people are always going to exist among the ~8 billion humans alive, somewhere.

All this brings me back to the Vulnerable World Hypothesis proposed by Nick Bostrom. In fact global totalitarian surveillance that stamps out all potentially dangerous research is one of his few proposed solutions in his paper. I don't know if I can stomach such a solution, but I think we are living the early stages of such a world that forces such questions to be asked, not one in which we picked out a "black ball" that will make us go extinct, but a sort of "green ball" that irreversibly poisons specific parts of collective humanity.

I would personally be in favor of OpenAI keeping GPT-4 and future models proprietary, much as it won't affect the open source spirit. Random hackers with powerful GPUs generating terabytes of SEO spam are less visible to the world and more difficult to hold publicly accountable than a huge corporation with billions in funding.

Terrorists would have a field day if they had access to nuclear weapons. The only thing stopping them is that the barrier to independently developing nuclear weapons is so high that it's only practical for powerful nation-states to have them.

In comparison it's trivial for both terrorists and powerful nation-states to download 60GB of weights and crunch numbers on a GPU cluster. Arguably the hardware requirements of the most sophisticated LLMs act as a similar barrier to widespread adoption even if they were open-source, but to nowhere near the same extent, and as with nukes that's just a happy coincidence of the current state of technology/known physical limitations than an intentional barrier to stopping their spread. Even as we speak there has been collective interest in discovering a way to decrease those hardware requirements (INT8/INT4 quantization) as much as possible so more people can run them for themselves, which shows no signs of abating.

All I can say is we're lucky that physics prevents us from mass-producing ICBMs on a fast enough time schedule, because if it were possible we'd probably attempt to do so for the sake of trying.

This is a problem that I hope attracts much more scrutiny in the near future, and beyond the domain of what's called "AI" right now. It doesn't feel talked about much at all. It feels like we can analyze the inner workings of new technology endlessly, because shiny new tech is cool and racks our brains, but hardly ever stop to consider why we keep pressing on to make even more advances. "Because we can" isn't a satisfactory answer, especially not when the stakes are so high. Why do we keep saying that? Can we ever be totally satisfied with what we already have available to use? Does this imply there will never be a stopping point? Would we go beyond inventing AGI if such a thing were possible?

I think the idea of resistance to change to preserve our chances of survival is worthy of study. I hope there will be serious anthropological studies investigating the nature of that kind of resistance and the opposite, driving insatiability of unbounded, overextended curiosity that marches forward no matter the cost - even if the chances of it affecting the final outcome are slim. It doesn't seem like there's much of an alternative besides repeating "pandora's box, cat out of the bag, genie out of the bottle" as a post-hoc justification for every set of unintended consequences for the rest of time.

The fact that we have imaginations and can foresee the potential consequences of actions has helped our species for so long up to this point. But if safety regulations needing to be written in blood to be effective is really the way our species is most likely to operate, then that has terrifying implications. I think 10 years from now a television crew will sit down the original researchers and engineers behind this tech branded AI and ask: Why didn't you stop?

This a thousand million times.

The mislabeling of LLMs and diffusion models as "artificial intelligence" is probably the biggest marketing blunder in the history of technological progress, one that could ironically affect the course of AI alignment itself.

Smart thinkers and policymakers are going to waste their time framing the problems the tech poses in terms of "an uncontrollable intelligence out to get us" like it's some kind of sentient overlord completely separate from humanity. But super-advanced technology that can operate in a closed loop (which could be called AGI depending on who's asked) isn't necessary for humanity to crater itself. What's required for such tech to come into existence in the first place? Humans. Who's going to be using it the whole time? Humans.

And I think there's still a lot of disruptive, world-changing tech to be discovered before AGI is even a remote possibility. In reality this tech is probably going to be more like a superpowered exoskeleton for CEOs, politicians and the like to sway public discourse in their favor.

"An uncontrollable intelligence" already describes the source of a lot of our current problems... that is, ourselves.

Rider is pretty much the only decent option for me, if Linux is a requirement. However not even Rider supports .NET Hot Reloading (Edit and Continue), because Microsoft hasn't implemented runtime support for it in Linux. Doing so would probably work against their vested interest in rolling in Visual Studio subscriptions. Yet EnC is a significant timesaver for my projects, to the point where I find it hard to work without it.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/12409

So the most efficient C# development solution for me is going back to Windows and Visual Studio. As they want it to be.

Noticed that there's no author attribution listed in the paper. I can imagine this will become more common as more significant diffusion advances are released.

> I feel like this is obvious and yet people keep making this argument for some reason.

It's because scores of people coming from non-art domains are suddenly being exposed to the art domain without much real knowledge of working in that domain, find the diffusion tech convincing enough that it entrances them, and makes them believe that their original notions of art are the most important thing that matters.

This debate has made me think, if there's some inability to automate a process, only the people that have spent months/years working in those domains will understand certain things about that process. The rest will be operating on only the beliefs they form from limited exposure. For example, I imagine for a lot of people, "art" is something that magically appears in their Twitter timeline within 5 seconds of opening the app, and years of opening Twitter and seeing new art almost instantly would probably condition some to believe that's all art really is, a thing that's plentiful and can be found near-instantly. So it's not controversial to them when they come across a piece of software that can give them thousands of new pictures near-instantly.

But obviously, prior to around October of 2022, there was nearly always a human behind the art on those timelines. To a human artist, their own work is probably not as plentiful and takes way longer to produce than to consume. Those consumers never needed to interact with the artist or understand the process to appreciate the art privately. Up to now that was usually not a problem.

Maybe that idea will undergo changes in the following years, that the tech is so advanced that a level of respect for the specific process of human artists is necessary for cordial communication of art to succeed. Otherwise it will be disparaged with the equivalent of "opinion discarded" from the nature of the thing.

It makes me wonder, what are the implications of this for domains that haven't been automated to the extent of SD yet? SD has proven that many, many people wanted this level of "art" automation from the beginning. The singular event that made this fact clear was the release of SD. There could be millions of people out there with their own preconceived notions, correct or not, just waiting for the ability to cut out the middleman in their own domains. It's like a powder keg waiting for the tiniest spark of technological progress to be ignited.

For the "respect of artists" angle, I'm reminded of this article[1] about a modern art installation from 12 years ago where people's art contest entries were trampled upon by visitors. People were upset by this.

As Marshall McLuhan once stated, "art is anything you can get away with."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiv#Chaos_Lounge

I really hope this isn't the end of the Wayback Machine. The IA being a centralized entity with an agenda not everyone agrees with was a problem not explored enough until it was too late.

吹いている ought to be 降っている and 今天 is not a word, it should be 今日