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Google continues to blow my mind with these models, but I think their ethics strategy is totally misguided and will result in them failing to capture this marke

• deleted 4y ago
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• breck 4y ago
  Another way to look at it is the people at Google are all now quasi-retired with kids and wouldn't be so mad if some scrappy startups ate their business lunches (while they are at home with their fams). Perhaps they are just subsidizing research.
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  “But then the inevitable might occur!” — someone at Google probably.
• ALittleLight 4y ago
  Personally, I find it infuriating that Google seems to believe they are the arbiters of morality and truth simply because some of their predecessors figured out good internet search and how to profitably place ads. Google has no special claim to be able to responsibly use these models just because they are rich.
  • trention 4y ago
    >Google has no special claim to be able to responsibly use these models Well, they do have the "special claim" of inventing the model and not owing its release to anyone.
    • ALittleLight 4y ago
      First, that isn't a claim of any kind regarding responsible use. If a child is the first one to discover a gun in the woods, that is no kind of claim that the child will use the gun responsibly. Second, Google's invention builds off of public research that was made available to them. They just choose to keep their iterations private.
      • trention 4y ago
        But there is a claim that not distributing guns to other children or giving them detailed instructions about how to get guns is more responsible than the reverse. Said "public research" didn't come with a requirement to release anything you build on top of it. This would pretty much be the research equivalent of compelled speech. Luckily, not happening.
    • TigeriusKirk 4y ago
      It's trained on our data, and so its release is in fact owed to us.
      • Kiro 4y ago
        You are confusing this with OpenAI like everyone else in this thread.
• faeriechangling 4y ago
  I’ve heard a lot of “data is the new oil” talk and the inevitability of google’s dominance yet I’m inclined to agree with you. Stable diffusion was a big wakeup call where it was clear how much value freedom and creativity really had. The ethics problem is an artifact of googles model of trying to keep their AI under lock and key and carefully controlled and opaque to outsiders in how the sausage gets made and what it’s made out of. Ultimately I think many of these products will fail because there is a misalignment between what Google thinks you should be able to do with their AI and what people want to do with AI. Whenever I see an AI ethicists speak I can’t help but think of priests attempting to control the printing press to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas completely sure of their own morality. History will remember them as villains.
  • alphabetting 4y ago
    I agree the ethicist types are very lame but if they were trying to be opaque and obscure how the sausage is made I don't think they would have released as many AI papers they have over past decade. It also seems to me that imagen is way better than stable diffusion. They're not aiming for a product that caters to AI creatives. They aiming for tools that would benefit a 3B+ userbase.
    • londons_explore 4y ago
      If you want to hire good researchers, you have to let them publish. Good researchers won't work somewhere that doesn't allow the publishing of papers. And without good researchers, you won't be on the forefront of tech. Thats why nearly all tech companies publish.
    • deleted 4y ago
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  • evouga 4y ago
    > History will remember them as villains. Interesting analogy. Google, like the priests, is acting out of mix of good intentions (protecting the public from perceived dangers) and self-interest (maintaining secular power, vs. a competitive advantage in the AI space). In the case of the priests, time has shown that their good intentions were misguided. I have a pretty hard time believing that history will be as unkind towards those who tried to protect minorities from biased tech, though of course that's impossible to judge in the moment.
• waynecochran 4y ago
  I imagine their lawyers guide them on some of this.
• jonas21 4y ago
  It makes sense though. The biggest threat to Google right now isn't some scrappy startup eating their lunch. It's the looming regulatory action over antitrust and privacy that could weaken or destroy their core business. As this is a political problem (not a technical one), they don't want to do anything that could upset politicians or turn public opinion against them. Personally, I doubt they have serious ethical concerns over releasing the model. I do believe they have serious "AI ethics 'thought leaders' and politicians will use this against us" concerns.
  • londons_explore 4y ago
    And that concern is well placed. Having the Google brand attached makes it a far more juicy target for newspapers...
  • throwaway23597 4y ago
    Agh, I've thought this through and you're completely right. It's an interesting conundrum. Certainly releasing powerful tools into the wild runs a high risk of swaying public opinion in a negative direction. Given this I honestly wonder why Google continues to invest so much in AI at all. I imagine having automatically generated video ads and stuff would be cool, but would hardly move the needle on the core business enough to justify the massive investment they've made into AI. Not that I'm complaining about it though... Google's tech advances always seem to diffuse (heh) into the open source world, so at least we have that to look forward to.
• IshKebab 4y ago
  I agree, but I also think that the ethics is just an excuse not to release the source code & models. The AI community clearly disapproves of papers without code. This is a way to skirt around that disapproval. You get to keep the code and models private and (they hope) not be criticised for it. With Stable Diffusion I think they just didn't expect someone to produce a truly open version. There are plenty of AI models that Google have made where they've maintained a competitive advantage for many years by not releasing the code/models, e.g. speech recognition.
• whatgoodisaroad 4y ago
  Perhaps Google hasn't found the right balance in this case, but as a general rule, less ethics === more market. This isn't unique in that way.
• dougmwne 4y ago
  Google is absolutely not going to start taking more risks. They are at the part of the business lifecycle where they squeeze the juice out of the cash cow and protect it jealously in the meantime. While Google gets much recognition for this research, I believe they are incapable as a corporate entity of creating a product out of it because they can no longer capable of taking risks. That is going to fall to other companies still building their product and able to gamble on risk-reward.
• rcoveson 4y ago
  Maybe I'm reading into it to much, but could it be that you're posting this comment with a throwaway account for the same reason that Google is trying to enforce Church WiFi Rules with its new tech? Seems like everybody with anything to lose is acting scared.
• alphabetting 4y ago
  Providing search results of the internet is not comparable to publishing a tool that can create any explicit scene your fingers can type out.
  • holoduke 4y ago
    Google image search is widely used. Imagine they incorporate ai generated content in the search results. That means that people remain at the Google site and thus an extra impression for their paid advertising.
  • throwaway23597 4y ago
    This is clearly a matter of opinion. When you frame it as "providing search results of the internet" yeah sure it doesn't sound so bad. But there are things on the internet far more fucked up than anything I could imagine, let alone describe in such a specific way that a model could generate a picture of it.
    • alphabetting 4y ago
      A matter of opinion that media and regulators would most likely not side with Google on if a tool were to be abused.
• abeppu 4y ago
  I will say, I've enjoyed playing with stable diffusion, I've been impressed with the explosion of tools built around it, and the stuff people are creating ... But all the stuff about bias in data is true. It really likes to render white people, unless you really specifically tell it something else ... in which case, you may receive an exaggerated stereotype. It seems to like producing younger adults. If all stock photography tomorrow forward was replaced with stable diffusion images, even ignoring the weird bodies and messed up faces and stuff, I think it would create negative effects. And once models are naively trained on images produced by the previous generation, how much worse will it be? I don't think "don't let the plebes have the models" is a good stance. But neither is pretending that the ethics and bias issues aren't here.
  • pwython 4y ago
    I've only had awesome experiences with Midjourney when it comes to generating non-white prompts. Here's some examples I did last month: https://imgur.com/a/6jitj73 https://imgur.com/a/6jitj73
    • iso1337 4y ago
      The fact that white is the default is already problematic.
      • karencarits 4y ago
        "Default" makes it sound like a deliberate decision or setting, but that is not how these models work. But I guess it would be trivial to actually make a setting to autmatically add specific terms (gender, race, style, ...) to all prompts if that is a desired feature
        • holoduke 4y ago
          Please no. I am all for neutrality, but the underlying cause is the training dataset. Change that if you want different results, but do not alter artificially.
• yreg 4y ago
  >You can't type any prompt that's "unsafe", you can't generate images of people, there are so many stupid limitations that the product is practically useless other than niche scenarios Imagen and Imagen Video is not released to the public at all. You might be confusing it with OpenAI's models.
  • burkaman 4y ago
    They are probably confusing OpenAI with DeepMind, which is owned by Google.
    • throwaway23597 4y ago
      No, I'm very much talking about the Google models. From the original link: "We have taken multiple steps to minimize these concerns, for example in internal trials, we apply input text prompt filtering, and output video content filtering. However, there are several important safety and ethical challenges remaining. Imagen Video and its frozen T5-XXL text encoder were trained on problematic data. While our internal testing suggest much of explicit and violent content can be filtered out, there still exists social biases and stereotypes which are challenging to detect and filter."
      • deleted 4y ago
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• j_k_eter 4y ago
  Google has no practical way to address ethics at Google-scale. Their ability to operate at all depends as ever upon outsourcing ethics to machine learning algorithms.
  • kajecounterhack 4y ago
    IIUC you're saying Google's algorithmic implementations of policy enforcement do not robustly or adequately address ethical concerns. Isn't the same true for, iono, the whole web? Human-based ethics don't scale either and can be worse (I mean, isn't that the issue with hiring pipelines? Juries?) I think it's gotten a ton better vs 10 years ago, and is getting better still. More on topic -- when folks here complain that Google can't release these models, it's not like they're just sitting there using that as an excuse -- Google has entire teams dedicated to ML safety trying to figure out how to filter out bad stuff, make models fairer, and avoid situations like M$FT's "Tay" (or worse).
• Kiro 4y ago
  What previous models are you actually referring to? OpenAI/Dall-E has these restrictions but they are not Google.
• FrasiertheLion 4y ago
  Why did you create a throwaway to post this? I've seen a lot of Stable Diffusion promoters on various platforms recently, with similarly new accounts. What is up with that?
  • throwaway23597 4y ago
    It's quite simply because I'm on my work computer, and I wanted to fire off a comment here. No nefarious purposes. My regular account is uejfiweun.
• kajecounterhack 4y ago
  It's not as simple as this. Google Search came without Safe Search & other guards at first because _implementing privacy & age controls is hard_. It's a second-order product after the initial product. Bad capabilities (e.g. cyberstalking) are side-effects of a product that "organizes the world's information and makes it universally accessible and useful," and if anything, over time Google has sought build in more safety. It's 2022 and we can be more thoughtful. Yes there are tradeoffs between unleashing new capabilities quickly vs being thoughtful and potentially conservative in what is made publicly available. I don't think it's bad that Google makes those tradeoffs. FWIW Google open sources _tons_ of models that aren't LLMs / diffusion models. It's just that LLMs & powerful generative models have particular ethical considerations that are worth thinking about (hopefully something was learned from the whole Timnit thing).
  • origin_path 4y ago
    You know safesearch is optional, right? It even disables itself if it knows you're looking for porn. There is nothing that stops children from overriding it. As for learning from the timnit thing I'm pretty sure the only thing people outside Google learned from that is that Google ai "ethicists" all seem to be crazy. Certainly that's the clear vibe on this thread.
    • kajecounterhack 4y ago
      > You know safesearch is optional, right? It even disables itself if it knows you're looking for porn. There is nothing that stops children from overriding it. You can let your kid use Google to look up math lectures without fearing that they would see something slightly traumatizing though, right? That wasn't the case in 1996! The point is that products have varying levels of readiness, and it's totally fair to say "the thing isn't ready, it has too many sharp edges." Especially when the thing could be used at scale. > As for learning from the timnit thing I'm pretty sure the only thing people outside Google learned from that is that Google ai "ethicists" all seem to be crazy. Certainly that's the clear vibe on this thread. That's a sad take, but who knows if it's true. HN commenters aren't exactly a representative sample.
• seydor 4y ago
  google can be sued for billions of money for a product that is not making any money yet. SD probably can't that s how i see it. So of course they ll cover their ass rather than trying to make something cool