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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 wakeu

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
  [deleted]
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.
- blagie 4y ago
  My experience is that corporations use self-serving pseudoethical arguments all the time. "We'd like to keep this proprietary.... Ummmm.. DEI! We can't release it due to DEI concerns!"
- ipaddr 4y ago
  History will treat them the same way residential native schools are being treated now. At the time taking these kids from their homes and giving them a real education which gives them a path to modern society was seen as protecting minorities. Today anyone associated with residential schools is seen as creating great harm to minorities. In the name of protecting [minorities, child, women, lgbt, etc] many harms will be done.
- saurik 4y ago
  > I have a pretty hard time believing that history will be as unkind towards those who tried to protect minorities from biased tech.. Most of the ethicists I see actually doing gatekeeping from direct use of models--as opposed to "merely" attempting model bias corrections or trying to convince people to avoid its overuse (which isn't at all the same)--are not trying to deal with the "AI copies our human biases" problem but are trying to prevent people from either building a paperclip optimizer that ends the world or (and this is the issue with all of these image models) making "bad content" like fake photographs of real people in compromising or unlikely scenarios that turn into "fake news" or are used for harassment. (I do NOT agree with the latter people, to be clear: I believe the world will be MUCH BETTER OFF if such "bad" image generation were fully commoditized and people stopped trying to centrally police information in general, as I maintain they are CAUSING the ACTUAL problem of misinformation feeling more rare or difficult to generate than it actually already is, which results in people trusting random people because "clearly some gatekeeper would have filtered this if it weren't true". But this just isn't the same thing as the people who I-think-rightfully point out "you should avoid outsourcing something to an AI if you care about it being biased".)
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  The priests tried to protect the entire population from eternal damnation. They were fighting for higher stakes.

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
[deleted]

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.

blagie 4y ago
My experience is that corporations use self-serving pseudoethical arguments all the time. "We'd like to keep this proprietary.... Ummmm.. DEI! We can't release it due to DEI concerns!"
ipaddr 4y ago
History will treat them the same way residential native schools are being treated now. At the time taking these kids from their homes and giving them a real education which gives them a path to modern society was seen as protecting minorities. Today anyone associated with residential schools is seen as creating great harm to minorities. In the name of protecting [minorities, child, women, lgbt, etc] many harms will be done.
saurik 4y ago
> I have a pretty hard time believing that history will be as unkind towards those who tried to protect minorities from biased tech.. Most of the ethicists I see actually doing gatekeeping from direct use of models--as opposed to "merely" attempting model bias corrections or trying to convince people to avoid its overuse (which isn't at all the same)--are not trying to deal with the "AI copies our human biases" problem but are trying to prevent people from either building a paperclip optimizer that ends the world or (and this is the issue with all of these image models) making "bad content" like fake photographs of real people in compromising or unlikely scenarios that turn into "fake news" or are used for harassment. (I do NOT agree with the latter people, to be clear: I believe the world will be MUCH BETTER OFF if such "bad" image generation were fully commoditized and people stopped trying to centrally police information in general, as I maintain they are CAUSING the ACTUAL problem of misinformation feeling more rare or difficult to generate than it actually already is, which results in people trusting random people because "clearly some gatekeeper would have filtered this if it weren't true". But this just isn't the same thing as the people who I-think-rightfully point out "you should avoid outsourcing something to an AI if you care about it being biased".)
faeriechangling 4y ago
The priests tried to protect the entire population from eternal damnation. They were fighting for higher stakes.