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Did OpenAI (Dall-E) and Google (Imagen) know Stable Diffusion was coming? I'm sure they were looking forward to many months of maintaining highly exclusive acc

Did OpenAI (Dall-E) and Google (Imagen) know Stable Diffusion was coming? I'm sure they were looking forward to many months of maintaining highly exclusive access and playing "too dangerous to release" games before SD completely upended the table.

dannyw 4y ago
Too dangerous to release, a codeword for selling access at 100% markup.
- jwitthuhn 4y ago
  Bonus points: If dall-e rejects an output image because it thinks the image is inappropriate they won't show it. But they will still charge you for the prompt.
  - O__________O 4y ago
    Is there even a public keyword list of words you’re not supposed to include?
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      I wonder if they keep that private to avoid people finding work arounds.
      - speedgoose 4y ago
        It’s perhaps not a simple list but an AI classifier, perhaps GPT-3 based.
        kvakkefly 4y ago
        Nuclear was apparently confirmed on the list, but I have recently used it to generate cool things around nuclear power. So suppose it is like you say.
    - jwitthuhn 4y ago
      There is no public list. Someone on reddit compiled a very limited list here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wa3jt6/banned_words_and_acceptable_words_lets_make_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wa3jt6/banned_words... The problem is that they will automatically ban accounts that trigger the filter too much, so people would have to burn a whole lot of accounts to assemble an even remotely-complete list.
      - redox99 4y ago
        Holy shit that list is insane. A lot of those words being banned would limit you enormously if you're trying to create art.
        jeffreygoesto 4y ago
        But it never has been about art?
      - bongoman37 4y ago
        This list seems incomplete. I've had the filter triggered on words like 'thong' as in thong slippers as well.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    How is this legal? If someone commissions a painting from you, you're not allowed to just say "I'm not giving you the painting, but I'm keeping your money." Why does doing it with a computer make it okay?
refulgentis 4y ago
Anyone moderately plugged into the AI art knew for at least 2 months. I'm guessing those teams didn't know in that they're AI researchers, and in my own employment at Google, I've been regularly reminded that being a technologist and being someone obsessed with a technology and pursuing it socially are different things. Even without knowing the precise individuals that'd do it, I knew in February that by August there would be an open source model challenging state of the art back then, if only because given 6 months _some_ open source team would try scaling to a bigger model. Another thing to point out is these teams are descendants of open source, Katherine Crawsons open source breakthroughs led to substantial improvements in DallE. Everyone should be saying her name 1000x more often.* She also helped create Stable Diffusion specifically, in substantial ways * I think. Maybe I misunderstand the technology dramatically. But I think it's just poorly understood how much she's been involved.
- astrange 4y ago
  > Another thing to point out is these teams are descendants of open source, Katherine Crawsons open source breakthroughs led to substantial improvements in DallE. Everyone should be saying her name 1000x more often.* She also helped create Stable Diffusion specifically, in substantial ways Not only that, but OpenAI didn't seem to know their CLIP model could be used to generate images (via Advad's CLIP+VQGAN) at all, otherwise they wouldn't have released it. So they did unintentionally start the "AI art" movement even if they didn't release a trained DALLE.
  - karmasimida 4y ago
    Well Google's paper showed you don't need CLIP anyway. T5 and other languages model can be used regardless. CLIP isn't the true blocker to entry, the dataset and compute is.
    - astrange 4y ago
      StableDiffusion has an open dataset, was funded by one guy, and apparently took "much less than $600k" to train on AWS (https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1563965366061211660 https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1563965366061211660). So it seems there actually aren't many barriers to entry at all. There's certainly a lot of legal questions, but if it's this easy to create your own model then it's hard to enforce anything…
karmasimida 4y ago
I think the fact those diffusion models are smaller and compute efficient than gigantic GPT models are in fact make them easier to use and distribute. BLOOM is out there, but not that many individuals with have like 8 3090 to host them, and the inference is still incredibly slow nevertheless
- goodside 4y ago
  BLOOM also doesn’t have GPT-3’s RLHF tuning, so anyone who tries to ask it questions or give it instructions in the manner GPT-3 supports will be disappointed. You have to k-shot prompt it or fine-tune it yourself for it to be useful.
cbozeman 4y ago
I don't know if they saw it coming or not, but frankly I'm glad it did. This idea of "technology gatekeeping" sickens me. I'm tired to death of people saying some non-sensical horseshit like, "The technology is too dangerous to be turned over to the hoi polloi!!" Give me a break... as if someone running StableDiffusion on their home system and creating naked centaur-women out of pictures of Kate Beckinsale and anime waifus out of Ariana Grande photos are going to cause the downfall of the modern era. StableDiffusion didn't upend the table... StableDiffusion gave the plans to the printing press to every person out there that wants to learn how to make their own print shop... and more power to them all, I say. I've had more fun and learned more about AI models in the past week than in I've had with AI in the past year, and I've been using img2img to feed my own art into SD to create whole new works that I've been able to touchup in Photoshop and upscale to print resolution. This is truly the kind of computing revolution that I love to see, and that comes around all too infrequently. The good from this will far, far outweigh any negatives.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  Technology gatekeeping is completely antithetical to the hacker spirit. Hackers built all this technology. There's no way a handful of megacorps are going to take it all for themselves.
  - phh 4y ago
    Right, like no megacorp ever prevented us from doing whatever we want for our smartphones. Oh wait. (No Pixels don't count, unless you can write your own TEE, your own sensor hub, and your own wake up word)
    - bheadmaster 4y ago
      I'm not saying they can't try, and succeed for a while. But eventually, we will always break free. Pixel exists (but apparently doesn't count because it's not perfect yet). Librem exists. PinePhone exists. More will exist in the future.

dannyw 4y ago

Too dangerous to release, a codeword for selling access at 100% markup.

jwitthuhn 4y ago
Bonus points: If dall-e rejects an output image because it thinks the image is inappropriate they won't show it. But they will still charge you for the prompt.
- O__________O 4y ago
  Is there even a public keyword list of words you’re not supposed to include?
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    I wonder if they keep that private to avoid people finding work arounds.
    - speedgoose 4y ago
      It’s perhaps not a simple list but an AI classifier, perhaps GPT-3 based.
      - kvakkefly 4y ago
        Nuclear was apparently confirmed on the list, but I have recently used it to generate cool things around nuclear power. So suppose it is like you say.
  - jwitthuhn 4y ago
    There is no public list. Someone on reddit compiled a very limited list here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wa3jt6/banned_words_and_acceptable_words_lets_make_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wa3jt6/banned_words... The problem is that they will automatically ban accounts that trigger the filter too much, so people would have to burn a whole lot of accounts to assemble an even remotely-complete list.
    - redox99 4y ago
      Holy shit that list is insane. A lot of those words being banned would limit you enormously if you're trying to create art.
      - jeffreygoesto 4y ago
        But it never has been about art?
    - bongoman37 4y ago
      This list seems incomplete. I've had the filter triggered on words like 'thong' as in thong slippers as well.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  How is this legal? If someone commissions a painting from you, you're not allowed to just say "I'm not giving you the painting, but I'm keeping your money." Why does doing it with a computer make it okay?

refulgentis 4y ago

Anyone moderately plugged into the AI art knew for at least 2 months. I'm guessing those teams didn't know in that they're AI researchers, and in my own employment at Google, I've been regularly reminded that being a technologist and being someone obsessed with a technology and pursuing it socially are different things. Even without knowing the precise individuals that'd do it, I knew in February that by August there would be an open source model challenging state of the art back then, if only because given 6 months _some_ open source team would try scaling to a bigger model. Another thing to point out is these teams are descendants of open source, Katherine Crawsons open source breakthroughs led to substantial improvements in DallE. Everyone should be saying her name 1000x more often.* She also helped create Stable Diffusion specifically, in substantial ways * I think. Maybe I misunderstand the technology dramatically. But I think it's just poorly understood how much she's been involved.

astrange 4y ago
> Another thing to point out is these teams are descendants of open source, Katherine Crawsons open source breakthroughs led to substantial improvements in DallE. Everyone should be saying her name 1000x more often.* She also helped create Stable Diffusion specifically, in substantial ways Not only that, but OpenAI didn't seem to know their CLIP model could be used to generate images (via Advad's CLIP+VQGAN) at all, otherwise they wouldn't have released it. So they did unintentionally start the "AI art" movement even if they didn't release a trained DALLE.
- karmasimida 4y ago
  Well Google's paper showed you don't need CLIP anyway. T5 and other languages model can be used regardless. CLIP isn't the true blocker to entry, the dataset and compute is.
  - astrange 4y ago
    StableDiffusion has an open dataset, was funded by one guy, and apparently took "much less than $600k" to train on AWS (https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1563965366061211660 https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1563965366061211660). So it seems there actually aren't many barriers to entry at all. There's certainly a lot of legal questions, but if it's this easy to create your own model then it's hard to enforce anything…

karmasimida 4y ago

I think the fact those diffusion models are smaller and compute efficient than gigantic GPT models are in fact make them easier to use and distribute. BLOOM is out there, but not that many individuals with have like 8 3090 to host them, and the inference is still incredibly slow nevertheless

goodside 4y ago
BLOOM also doesn’t have GPT-3’s RLHF tuning, so anyone who tries to ask it questions or give it instructions in the manner GPT-3 supports will be disappointed. You have to k-shot prompt it or fine-tune it yourself for it to be useful.

cbozeman 4y ago

I don't know if they saw it coming or not, but frankly I'm glad it did. This idea of "technology gatekeeping" sickens me. I'm tired to death of people saying some non-sensical horseshit like, "The technology is too dangerous to be turned over to the hoi polloi!!" Give me a break... as if someone running StableDiffusion on their home system and creating naked centaur-women out of pictures of Kate Beckinsale and anime waifus out of Ariana Grande photos are going to cause the downfall of the modern era. StableDiffusion didn't upend the table... StableDiffusion gave the plans to the printing press to every person out there that wants to learn how to make their own print shop... and more power to them all, I say. I've had more fun and learned more about AI models in the past week than in I've had with AI in the past year, and I've been using img2img to feed my own art into SD to create whole new works that I've been able to touchup in Photoshop and upscale to print resolution. This is truly the kind of computing revolution that I love to see, and that comes around all too infrequently. The good from this will far, far outweigh any negatives.

bheadmaster 4y ago
Technology gatekeeping is completely antithetical to the hacker spirit. Hackers built all this technology. There's no way a handful of megacorps are going to take it all for themselves.
- phh 4y ago
  Right, like no megacorp ever prevented us from doing whatever we want for our smartphones. Oh wait. (No Pixels don't count, unless you can write your own TEE, your own sensor hub, and your own wake up word)
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    I'm not saying they can't try, and succeed for a while. But eventually, we will always break free. Pixel exists (but apparently doesn't count because it's not perfect yet). Librem exists. PinePhone exists. More will exist in the future.