7 ms·
Can't believe Stable Diffusion is out for public use and that's considered “OK”
- vivegi 4y agoIf you want to know how good a mousetrap is, you should not ask mice for their opinion.
- throwawayffffas 4y agoI can't believe I have to login to use it, I also can't believe the generated content goes through automated content moderation before I get to see it. The state of affairs in open AI software (the concept) is shameful.
- indigochill 4y agoThis was my feeling about all the VR systems as well. I haven't looked deeply into it, but when I was excited about getting my hands on some hardware and hacking away, it seemed like every device required going through some megacorp and their walled garden and no VR device is treated simply like a monitor on your face, which killed my interest in being a VR dev.
- grumbel 4y agoThe problem with VR is that's is just a way more complex system than a monitor. You have IMUs, cameras, controllers, lens distortion, hand tracking and a lot of other stuff to deal with. Until a little over a year ago there wasn't even any kind of API devices could plug into, it was all vendor specific. 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.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoIf you are talking about stable diffusion you can both run it locally without logging in, and disable content moderation. 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?
- throwawayffffas 4y agoYou need to login to download the weights the first time. The whole experience kind of left me with a bad taste. I do appreciate they didn't go the API access route like open AI and others but still the experience is a far cry compared to traditional open source software. Additionally their license, with it's verbosity was kind of a deal breaker, I am of the opinion that it would be better to just go with a standard software license, like the MIT license or something or Apache or something.
- baylearn 4y agoFull title should have been: "Senior research scientist at GoogleAI: “Can't believe Stable Diffusion is out there for public use and that's considered as ‘ok’!!!"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nullish_signal 4y agoI can't believe """Open"""AI is unavailable for me to download and tinker with Looking forward to Stable Diffusion 1.5!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thot_experiment 4y agoShocker, individual who's job depends on gatekeeping technology condemns not gatekeeping technology. Imagine. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- tpoacher 4y ago(~ Upton Sinclair)
- dqpb 4y agoPretty funny coming from a Googler since these generators are basically search (over image-space).
- novantadue 4y agoMakes me wonder what percent of image searches would be better served by image generation?
- napier 4y agoMakes me wonder that too. Along with what percentage of internet searches in general would be better served by a user owned and fine tuned InstructGPT model frontend linked to a network of larger backend models of various kinds and generalist specialisations. Perhaps this is something execs also see, hence the hyperaggressive gatekeeping around the tech can more be interpreted as moat dredging rather than genuine corporate concern for "safety".
- c7b 4y agoI've seen the term "generative search" used.
- texaslonghorn5 4y agohttps://bakztfuture.substack.com/p/statement-on-stable-diffusion https://bakztfuture.substack.com/p/statement-on-stable-diffu... another interesting longform statement on this topic
- napier 4y agoI've been enjoying his repeated diatribes whiplashing between outrage/enthralment over the past few weeks, in a sense.
- ivraatiems 4y agoSo is the logic "technology X is potentially dangerous and therefore should be kept in the hands of the morally ambiguous (at best) corporation that created 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?
- TheMightyLlama 4y agoThis raises a good question. Is it the model that produces racist, sexist or any other ‘ist ’ results inherently racist? Or is it how we use it? Is the knife a murderer or the person who wields it?
- ivraatiems 4y agoThe issue is almost certainly that if the model is racist, it's cause it was trained on racist data. Which is 100% a real thing that happens. 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?
- bergenty 4y agoThat’s not true. You can specify SD create a racist meme out of a description that isn’t inherently racist.
- incrudible 4y agoFair enough, but what does that imply? The magic N-Ball that has a minor chance of saying something unintentionally racist is such dangerous technology that it must be kept out of the hands of the peasants?
- ALittleLight 4y agoI can't imagine the hubris required to make a person think that because their company is rich they are especially and uniquely entitled to the fruits of academic research.
- throwaway5959 4y agoImagine no more: gestures broadly
- zajio1am 4y agoLets hope that such self-righteous people do not get power to restrict access to new technologies to others.
- junofan 4y agoThe linked Twitter profile is wild. Reads like ego-tripping. Don’t think there’s much danger tbh.
- CommieBobDole 4y agoOddly, the only punctuation she seems to use is the exclamation point. Makes her seem very surprised! and excited! about everything!
- gedy 4y agoLike reading a Mary Worth comic. I mean!
- mysterydip 4y agoThey won't, at least directly. That's why they hire lobbyists.
- georgebarnett 4y agoPutting aside the gatekeeping aspect of this comment, I found the rest of the arguments made for keeping this model closed really shallow. I would have hoped for a much more reasoned and logically sound argument from a professional researcher.
- CommieBobDole 4y agoGiven this and the other weirdness that keeps coming out of Google's AI department, I find myself wondering: is AI research considered a serious area of academic inquiry, with respected scholars and stuff, or is it mostly full of crackpots and con artists and self-promoters?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoIf I had to guess, for every 1 real ML researcher at Google there's 3 busybodies trying to limit what can be researched.
- SanjayMehta 4y agoThat person's TL is full of group think. I also learnt a new term: "spatial apartheid."
- SanjayMehta 4y agoAI seems to attract a particularly strange set of groupies. Google is today where Bell Labs used to be back in the day. Lots of money and lots of researchers running wild. Although Google seems to go out of their way to hire particularly interesting people. With pronouns and what not.
- ShamelessC 4y agoSeems like it's less of an issue for their applied research and more to do with ethics or policy researchers. 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- origin_path 4y agoKind of a weird question. It definitely is a respected area of research, yeah, and Google no doubt do excellent work. 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.
- c7b 4y agoShould add: "Google researcher: ..." to the title.
- throwaway5959 4y agoNobody gate keeps like data scientists and ML engineers.
- teruakohatu 4y agoThat is far from true. Piles of DS/ML papers and models are published daily.
- throwaway5959 4y agoTry breaking into DS/ML as a backend engineer. Even with Python experience, a ton of backend experience, an MS in CS, and courses taken in the topic, I’ve still been unable to do so. And I know a lot of people in the same boat.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoIt's big tech culture, not data science or ML culture. It just happens that big tech produces a lot of data science and ML.
- arisAlexis 4y agoStop technology! Make silos, make it secret, only a few priviledged should have it. I condemn progress stop it now! He said..
- tetris11 4y agoTo quote Nancy Kress's /Beggars In Spain/ trilogy: > 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.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoI tried to find a demo of GPT3 just now and I could not. Yet in just a week I've seen half a dozen new projects or improvements on SD. This veneer of safety is just rent seeking bullshit.
- maccam912 4y agoMaybe not exactly what you need from GPT3, but the SD of language models right now is Bloom: https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom which might serve your needs.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoThank you!
- iLoveOncall 4y agoBetween her and the other lunatic that believed his AI was sentient, I think Google should review their hiring process for their AI related roles. The statement is so ridiculous I thought at first that she meant that it is not "ok" but "amazing".
- incrudible 4y agoEthics and AI is something that Google strongly pretends to care about and this sort of hire just fits the bill.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoThey're hiring as many loonies as they can, so they know where they are. 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.
- Dma54rhs 4y agoThe modern day church establishment telling to stop printing presses because it's too dangerous of a tool for the masses.
- bambax 4y agoThat's exactly what it is; and in a way the church was right: once people started to read the scriptures for themselves in vernacular they formed their own opinion and created different churches.
- Eleison23 4y agoThat is not actually what happened. 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.
- bambax 4y agoThe New Testament canon wasn't established before the 4th century AD, so not "mere decades" after Jesus' death (or "ascension" if you're a believer), but centuries after (although of course it didn't happen in a fortnight, it was a process that had started earlier). The wikipedia article about this is quite well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_New_Testament_canon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_New_Testame... 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?
- 4y ago
- rpigab 4y agoDon't be evil. 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.
- fuu_dev 4y agoThere is a lot of unfounded fear about AI in general lately. 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.
- taylorius 4y agoIt's neither OK, nor not OK. it's just what's inevitably bound to happen. Even borderline magic technology like Dall-E, Stable Diffusion etc. will become commonplace over time (and it happens extra quickly with digital technology). Ethics committees and other such bodies are largely pissing in the wind with this sort of stuff, in my view.
- GuB-42 4y ago> Sr Research Scientist at Google. Opinions are my own (she/her) 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.
- napier 4y agoShe brings her opinions to work, clearly. And Google's policy for years has been to publish clickbait research that tease AI wonders that stretch the imagination and then never release to public access, let alone the open source and academic researcher communities they feed off. It's obvious that at the least that particular sr scientist's "safety" conceptualisation frameworks are triviality obsessed, divorced from reality and utterly miscalibrated.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoActually, if you care about the effects on society, the safest thing to do with stable diffusion or GPT-3 would be to release if publicly and widely. 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.
- throw__away7391 4y agoWhy does so much of this moralizing crap seem come from employees of a certain company whose core revenue model has so many moral issues to criticize? Like, "Hey, I work at ExxonMobil, let me tell you how you eating that hamburger is destroying the planet"
- napier 4y agoI don't think I've ever seen so many exclamation marks on a single Twitter timeline.
- rayiner 4y agoI’m old and can’t parse the title. What’s the problem?
- npteljes 4y agoHer stated issue is that the Stable Diffusion project is open for the public to use and modify. 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://twitter.com/negar_rz/status/1565246343769120769 (https://nitter.net/negar_rz/status/1565246343769120769 https://nitter.net/negar_rz/status/1565246343769120769)
- xor99 4y agoStable diffusion is good open source software and is well motivated in a very complicated technology/political space. Sure they inherit all of the existing problems with image datasets but they have some plans to mitigate racial and socio-political bias. The alternative is to either not do the project or make it secretive under the supposed motivation of safety. This interview is a good overview of the principles behind their approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ2QtKcK2dA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ2QtKcK2dA