7 ms·

There is a clear risk from these sorts of models as they get better - I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images (or even worse,

by atty 4y ago

There is a clear risk from these sorts of models as they get better - I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images (or even worse, video). We’re not at that point yet, but these things are getting better fast, so it’s only a matter of time. The problem is that there’s no way to mitigate those risks except to keep the model behind an inference-only API, or not release it at all - as soon as the model is open sourced then fine-tuning the model can introduce whatever behavior you want. Holding the models back is virtue signaling at best and actively harmful at worst, because it draws attention from individuals who will take it as a challenge to find ways to misuse them, and cuts businesses and the open source community off from models that would otherwise be very useful to them, that they could help to improve. I’m concerned this is becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, where more companies will start to do the same thing, primarily because it’s what everyone else is doing.

carlosdp 4y ago
> There is a clear risk from these sorts of models as they get better - I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images (or even worse, video). This has been possible without AI for a very very long time now (just open photoshop, etc). It barely ever happens, and society hasn't collapsed. I keep seeing this argument come up and it baffles me that informed technologists take it seriously, as if it were impossible to convincingly manipulate images before DALL-E came around.
- atty 4y ago
  There is a difference in ease of use. I could never use photoshop to fake something like that even if I wanted to. Further, we have seen harm come from some of this already, there’s a pretty big online community that uses deepfakes to put people in situations they would rather not be in, the most obvious being porn.
  - carlosdp 4y ago
    > There is a difference in ease of use. I could never use photoshop to fake something like that even if I wanted to. You couldn't, but basically any VFX shop easily could. Point is, it doesn't make anything possible that wasn't already possible, it just makes it more accessible. That's an inevitability with technology, as time goes on. The counter is not to try and suppress it, that has never worked and never will.
    - derefr 4y ago
      What motivation would a VFX shop have to do such a thing, though? (Money, sure, but what's a motive strong enough to be worth commissioning them?) It's always individuals who want to harm others in this particular way; and individuals don't throw around big-VFX-project amounts of money on petty revenge. But they'd certainly spend $20. DDoS attacks got a lot (1000x) more commonplace once there were DDoS services that let you buy an hour of attacking someone for $20. Same idea here.
      - chii 4y ago
        and you can easily just drive your car into somebody to kill them. DDoS services are almost always purely malicious (you can _may be_ argue that you can use them for pen-testing or load-testing). But cars are not just purely malicious; there's a lot of useful things cars can do, and that's why the dangers of car ownership is outweighed by the benefits, as judged by society - we just have some road rules, and licenses, so that people know to use them responsibly. Why not the same with an AI model?
      - johannboehme 4y ago
        we are talking pictures atm. not videos. I bet you could get as good as SD with two weeks of free time, lots of youtube tutorials and with a photoshop license.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    I'm going to take an unpopular position: there's no harm being done. It's not putting people in positions they would rather not be in, but putting their likeness into those situations. It's a key difference: if someone makes a paper mache of a naked Trump to use in a protest, is harm being done to him? The idea that it's "doing harm" is simply inventing a new form of lèse-majesté. Verbally, we regularly do the same: we might take a signifier for someone and place it in a representation. "Rick likes to fuck goats every day." Have I done harm to Rick?
    - rgmerk 4y ago
      Be serious for a moment. If I circulated a convincing-looking video of Rick fucking goats to his parents, partner and his boss at the school where he works, that could easily do considerable harm to Rick.
      - zarzavat 4y ago
        I don’t think that is a good example, because the harm in that case is the embarrassment and you can achieve the same results in 10 minutes with any image editing software. For AI image generation to cause harm specifically, the harm has to be consequent to the additional realism. IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”.
        Morgawr 4y ago
        > the harm in that case is the embarrassment and you can achieve the same results in 10 minutes with any image editing software The harm is not the "embarrassment" of seeing someone in the likeness of yourself (or your son, your friend, your partner, etc) doing something shameful. The harm is the fact that people are very likely to believe it is true and it's not a fake obviously edited photo or video. You can disagree on the seriousness of the harm or risk or danger or whatever but I think the distinction between an obviously silly/embarrassing fake (a puppet, papier mache, badly done photoshop picture) and a realistic convincing deepfake video is pretty obvious. They aren't even in the same ballpark. > IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”. This is also a really good point and I agree it's a danger.
  - Geee 4y ago
    Deepfakes are just an extension of imagination. We can already imagine people in any situation, making an image of it doesn't cause any more harm.
    - zakki 4y ago
      I don’t know why you put image and imagination in the same place. It is different. Imagination is the result of thinking. Image is the result of action. We can imagine killing people. Nobody harmed. But killing people in real life?
      - lolinder 4y ago
        Image is not the result of action, it's the projection of imagination into the physical world. In your example, the correct parallel isn't killing people in real life, it's making an image of killing people. The ethics of making such images are debatable, but they already permeate our society without AI.
        taylorius 4y ago
        How do you know? The whole point of a deepfake is that it is indistinguishable from a photo of a real life event.
      - matheusmoreira 4y ago
        I can imagine a person killing other people. I can draw a person killing other people. I can make a computer draw a person killing other people. In all three cases, zero people were harmed.
        TuringTest 4y ago
        But if you if you spread the image in a forum of haters, you may incite someone to kill that person. That's why there are laws against harassment. The danger is not the existence of an image, it is the act of communication that has consequences.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    Deepfakes have been very accessibly possible since 2019. Corridor did essentially the entire pipeline then: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3dBiNGufIJw&vl=en https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3dBiNGufIJw&vl=en You can download and run this software right now: http://faceswap.dev/ http://faceswap.dev/ and it will do a better job, and do it on video, then any AI image generator. The technology is over 3 years old and the world hasn't ended, the harassment hasn't happened. It's so common that your phone runs it for Instagram. There's this whole narrative here that "this harm is new" and not only is it not new, it's not even better then what we already had.
- BoxOfRain 4y ago
  People seem to forget that people as early as Joseph Stalin was all about manipulating images for unpleasant reasons, this isn't a new phenomenon at all.
dannyw 4y ago
This is not new. Imagine not releasing tools like curl or nmap because it can be used for hacking. The issue is, as an industry and society, we somehow bought the "safety" and "harm" charade a little bit too much, and somehow think it's a reasonable argument instead of being completely insane.
- always2slow 4y ago
  More like the "safety" and "harm" charade was crammed down our gullets at every turn either by stick or carrot.
- atty 4y ago
  I believe you misunderstood my post. (Or I have misunderstood yours) I was not arguing that the models should not be released. I was pointing out that the statement that no harm has been done with them was false, and that even though that is the case it is probably better for society, on the whole, for them to be open. We can both admit that the tools can and will be used for bad purposes, and come to the conclusion that their benefits outweigh the negatives. We would not be doing any favors to our own arguments by pretending otherwise.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    Given OpenAI’s extreme restrictions on Dalle 2, can anybody point to any harm that has been done with Stable Diffusion in particular since it launched? Even a single instance. Because I have only seen strictly positive coverage of people having fun with it.
    - needle0 4y ago
      Personally I am strongly on the opinion of favoring openness, but since you asked, there was this: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/xofxo3/a_japanese_misused_stablediffusion_to_spread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/xofxo3/a_j... The hoax was pretty quickly debunked, as the attempt was pretty crude. The images were full of artifacts and the image sizes were all 512x512 squares (the default image size for Stable Diffusion) with no attempt made to crop it to more common aspect ratios. So in terms of harm "done" I guess it was pretty minor, but I'm still leaving it out here since it made big enough of a commotion to make it to nationwide news stories.
sbierwagen 4y ago
>There is a clear risk from these sorts of models as they get better - I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images And the risk behind that is...? If you drill down with such claims the core is always "someone might use this to lie online" and the proposed solution every single time is: more surveillance. End anonymity. Have a Facebook account required to use the internet. Real name and real face policies for every online interaction.
- atty 4y ago
  I strongly suspect you’ve never been on the end of an internet doxxing/hate brigade if you can’t imagine how this could be used to make someone’s life a living hell. I’ll explain again that I think they can be used for bad actions, and also that they should still be released, because the benefits will outweigh the negatives. It does not hurt to admit that some things can be dangerous when used in nefarious ways. No one suggests we ban kitchen knives even though they are lethal, because their utility is massive, and outweighs their danger. In much the same way these models have extreme utility, that almost certainly outweighs their potential negatives.
  - flycaliguy 4y ago
    I totally agree. People often argue that photoshop has been around forever and so on. Creating sophisticated pornographic video of any individual is brand new. Creating an app that realistically removes clothing from any photo is new technology. I actually just now came up with an idea for a browser plug-in that removes clothing from every image loaded.
    - echelon 4y ago
      And we're going to get very used to it in short order. We may make laws that prohibit online harassment, and that should be the mechanism we use to deal with this. Not through technology bans.
    - zhynn 4y ago
      The trolling terrifies me. Trolling someone by creating awful video (just think about how deeply, photo-realistically, awful it could be - porn is just the tip of the iceberg) is going to get really bad. I am not sure how this is going to shake out. The easiest will be video of famous people doing awful things. A little harder is doing a custom training on a particular person's likeness, and videos of that person doing awful things. That high-schooler. That child. It's not a happy idea. There should be severe consequences for deliberately making something like this with the intent to harass (troll). The fact is we have not even scratched the surface of classifying trolling as a real crime. I am less concerned with the tech (it's inevitable, hand wringing about it is not useful), and more concerned with the fact that we still have essentially no real consequences to this kind of harassment. I suspect that strong anonymity is incompatible with civilized life, since the few edgelords will always end up ruining it for the many. We have collectively decided that some amount of privacy must be sacrificed to live in a civilized place where you can address grievance (the subpoena must be served to someone). Surveillance is a weapon for tyranny, but I think that we need to flip the script. The relationship between tyranny and surveillance means we need better governments, not more anonymity. I also suspect we don't need to change anything except enforcement. I think trolls are a lot less anonymous than they think they are, since their opsec is typically nonexistent. It's just that we have no enforcers, and for some reason don't care. If I had a magic wand, I would convert the DEA wholesale over to dealing with online crimes (trolling, CP, trafficking, etc).
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
> There is a clear risk from these sorts of models as they get better - I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images Been possible on home computers for 31 years for anyone who actually wants to do it. It literally doesn't matter and I think Stability has proven that the "AI Ethics" part of these models was essentially meaningless busy work at best, and at worse stealing compute credits from users like Dall-E purposefully charging you with something you didn't ask for. Once every home computer can make the fake images AI Ethicists larp about then the power of fake images disappears because everyone knows not to trust them. It only has power if only a few can make them and never told the world it was even possible.
- TuringTest 4y ago
  Nobody should trust faked quotes attributed to celebrities or ethnic groups in Twitter or Whatsapp, yet these fakes have ruined political campaigns and led to mass killings. Society doesn't adapt in the way you suggest by people disregarding what you think is irrelevant.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    Don't try to use open internet platforms for your political campaigns. I think "feedback" in that case is justified. People defended themselves against propaganda. The campaigns have ruined themselves. I am not sure about mass killings. Some say that Facebook enabled a genocide in Myanmar, but I think that is a false hypothesis. It was used as a platform by conflicting parties, sure, but it wasn't the reason for the conflict. Google has strong governmental ties right now, so opposing any of their messages regardless of content seems sensible. Without backlash it would just fortify the situation right now so it has to be costly for both Google and political parties. Google lost a lot of trust in recent years, sadly that is not true for their market influence. Perhaps they put out these message because government contracts require it, the user wouldn't know because that is not transparent.
  - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    > Society doesn't adapt in the way you suggest by people disregarding what you think is irrelevant. It's not what I think, it's what has been proven in the 32 years since photoshop was invented. What killings are you talking about that were caused by the existence of image manipulation?
i_like_apis 4y ago
I agree. Convincing fake content will eventually make us doubt our own history, let alone news media and current events. That concerns me, but I don’t think holding this tech back helps. But those aren’t the issues they claim are concerning to them. It’s just stupid identity politics. They want their model to lie to us about the world and say things like everyone is equally likely to any attribute. They have a “reality” problem apparently.
colordrops 4y ago
> recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images (or even worse, video). We’re not at that point yet Yes we are. There have been papers coming out on this tech for years now, with even the south park people doing videos using it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM
matheusmoreira 4y ago
These "risks" only exist because people somehow came to believe they actually have control over their "likeness". They don't. They never had. It's an illusion. The only risk here is exposing this for the lie it is. Maybe once it's trivially easy to copy someone else's "likeness", society will finally be able to accept it and evolve past it.
- echelon 4y ago
  Well said. Biological twins have never had control over this. If one twin wants to be a porn star, there's nothing the other can do. Edit: one could imagine a future dystopia where clones are created to bypass "identity IP".
bufferoverflow 4y ago
> I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images (or even worse, video). We’re not at that point yet Yes, we are. Open source stable diffusion can be trained on any person's images, as long as you have around 20 from different angles. Costs around 50 cents on rented GPUs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqeo3oDP6Qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqeo3oDP6Qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m__xadX0z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m__xadX0z0
- hda2 4y ago
  And people will get accustomed to (i.e. not take seriously) these new AI-generated images like they have with photoshopped images. "Ethicists" act like society will somehow not adapt to this tech like they have with all the tech that came before it. I put ethicists in quotes because the arguments they use don't hold up to scrutiny and don't seem to be motivated by real ethical concerns. At least not to me.
  - mekkkkkk 4y ago
    I think your are right about society adapting to this tech, and I don't think these AI technologies can or should be contained. But. The Photoshop argument is a bit tiresome. AI will bring about a fundamental shift in content creation and it will disrupt how we treat media as a whole. Photoshop and other manual technologies are naturally gatekept by the required skill, effort and source images. Once AI media generation matures, all that goes out the window. Anyone will be able to convincingly fake anything with almost no effort and zero traceability. That shouldn't be downplayed. The concerns are real.

by atty 4y ago

carlosdp 4y ago

> There is a clear risk from these sorts of models as they get better - I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images (or even worse, video). This has been possible without AI for a very very long time now (just open photoshop, etc). It barely ever happens, and society hasn't collapsed. I keep seeing this argument come up and it baffles me that informed technologists take it seriously, as if it were impossible to convincingly manipulate images before DALL-E came around.

atty 4y ago
There is a difference in ease of use. I could never use photoshop to fake something like that even if I wanted to. Further, we have seen harm come from some of this already, there’s a pretty big online community that uses deepfakes to put people in situations they would rather not be in, the most obvious being porn.
- carlosdp 4y ago
  > There is a difference in ease of use. I could never use photoshop to fake something like that even if I wanted to. You couldn't, but basically any VFX shop easily could. Point is, it doesn't make anything possible that wasn't already possible, it just makes it more accessible. That's an inevitability with technology, as time goes on. The counter is not to try and suppress it, that has never worked and never will.
  - derefr 4y ago
    What motivation would a VFX shop have to do such a thing, though? (Money, sure, but what's a motive strong enough to be worth commissioning them?) It's always individuals who want to harm others in this particular way; and individuals don't throw around big-VFX-project amounts of money on petty revenge. But they'd certainly spend $20. DDoS attacks got a lot (1000x) more commonplace once there were DDoS services that let you buy an hour of attacking someone for $20. Same idea here.
    - chii 4y ago
      and you can easily just drive your car into somebody to kill them. DDoS services are almost always purely malicious (you can _may be_ argue that you can use them for pen-testing or load-testing). But cars are not just purely malicious; there's a lot of useful things cars can do, and that's why the dangers of car ownership is outweighed by the benefits, as judged by society - we just have some road rules, and licenses, so that people know to use them responsibly. Why not the same with an AI model?
    - johannboehme 4y ago
      we are talking pictures atm. not videos. I bet you could get as good as SD with two weeks of free time, lots of youtube tutorials and with a photoshop license.
- scarmig 4y ago
  I'm going to take an unpopular position: there's no harm being done. It's not putting people in positions they would rather not be in, but putting their likeness into those situations. It's a key difference: if someone makes a paper mache of a naked Trump to use in a protest, is harm being done to him? The idea that it's "doing harm" is simply inventing a new form of lèse-majesté. Verbally, we regularly do the same: we might take a signifier for someone and place it in a representation. "Rick likes to fuck goats every day." Have I done harm to Rick?
  - rgmerk 4y ago
    Be serious for a moment. If I circulated a convincing-looking video of Rick fucking goats to his parents, partner and his boss at the school where he works, that could easily do considerable harm to Rick.
    - zarzavat 4y ago
      I don’t think that is a good example, because the harm in that case is the embarrassment and you can achieve the same results in 10 minutes with any image editing software. For AI image generation to cause harm specifically, the harm has to be consequent to the additional realism. IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”.
      - Morgawr 4y ago
        > the harm in that case is the embarrassment and you can achieve the same results in 10 minutes with any image editing software The harm is not the "embarrassment" of seeing someone in the likeness of yourself (or your son, your friend, your partner, etc) doing something shameful. The harm is the fact that people are very likely to believe it is true and it's not a fake obviously edited photo or video. You can disagree on the seriousness of the harm or risk or danger or whatever but I think the distinction between an obviously silly/embarrassing fake (a puppet, papier mache, badly done photoshop picture) and a realistic convincing deepfake video is pretty obvious. They aren't even in the same ballpark. > IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”. This is also a really good point and I agree it's a danger.
- Geee 4y ago
  Deepfakes are just an extension of imagination. We can already imagine people in any situation, making an image of it doesn't cause any more harm.
  - zakki 4y ago
    I don’t know why you put image and imagination in the same place. It is different. Imagination is the result of thinking. Image is the result of action. We can imagine killing people. Nobody harmed. But killing people in real life?
    - lolinder 4y ago
      Image is not the result of action, it's the projection of imagination into the physical world. In your example, the correct parallel isn't killing people in real life, it's making an image of killing people. The ethics of making such images are debatable, but they already permeate our society without AI.
      - taylorius 4y ago
        How do you know? The whole point of a deepfake is that it is indistinguishable from a photo of a real life event.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      I can imagine a person killing other people. I can draw a person killing other people. I can make a computer draw a person killing other people. In all three cases, zero people were harmed.
      - TuringTest 4y ago
        But if you if you spread the image in a forum of haters, you may incite someone to kill that person. That's why there are laws against harassment. The danger is not the existence of an image, it is the act of communication that has consequences.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Deepfakes have been very accessibly possible since 2019. Corridor did essentially the entire pipeline then: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3dBiNGufIJw&vl=en https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3dBiNGufIJw&vl=en You can download and run this software right now: http://faceswap.dev/ http://faceswap.dev/ and it will do a better job, and do it on video, then any AI image generator. The technology is over 3 years old and the world hasn't ended, the harassment hasn't happened. It's so common that your phone runs it for Instagram. There's this whole narrative here that "this harm is new" and not only is it not new, it's not even better then what we already had.
BoxOfRain 4y ago
People seem to forget that people as early as Joseph Stalin was all about manipulating images for unpleasant reasons, this isn't a new phenomenon at all.

dannyw 4y ago

This is not new. Imagine not releasing tools like curl or nmap because it can be used for hacking. The issue is, as an industry and society, we somehow bought the "safety" and "harm" charade a little bit too much, and somehow think it's a reasonable argument instead of being completely insane.

always2slow 4y ago
More like the "safety" and "harm" charade was crammed down our gullets at every turn either by stick or carrot.
atty 4y ago
I believe you misunderstood my post. (Or I have misunderstood yours) I was not arguing that the models should not be released. I was pointing out that the statement that no harm has been done with them was false, and that even though that is the case it is probably better for society, on the whole, for them to be open. We can both admit that the tools can and will be used for bad purposes, and come to the conclusion that their benefits outweigh the negatives. We would not be doing any favors to our own arguments by pretending otherwise.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  Given OpenAI’s extreme restrictions on Dalle 2, can anybody point to any harm that has been done with Stable Diffusion in particular since it launched? Even a single instance. Because I have only seen strictly positive coverage of people having fun with it.
  - needle0 4y ago
    Personally I am strongly on the opinion of favoring openness, but since you asked, there was this: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/xofxo3/a_japanese_misused_stablediffusion_to_spread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/xofxo3/a_j... The hoax was pretty quickly debunked, as the attempt was pretty crude. The images were full of artifacts and the image sizes were all 512x512 squares (the default image size for Stable Diffusion) with no attempt made to crop it to more common aspect ratios. So in terms of harm "done" I guess it was pretty minor, but I'm still leaving it out here since it made big enough of a commotion to make it to nationwide news stories.

sbierwagen 4y ago

>There is a clear risk from these sorts of models as they get better - I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images And the risk behind that is...? If you drill down with such claims the core is always "someone might use this to lie online" and the proposed solution every single time is: more surveillance. End anonymity. Have a Facebook account required to use the internet. Real name and real face policies for every online interaction.

atty 4y ago
I strongly suspect you’ve never been on the end of an internet doxxing/hate brigade if you can’t imagine how this could be used to make someone’s life a living hell. I’ll explain again that I think they can be used for bad actions, and also that they should still be released, because the benefits will outweigh the negatives. It does not hurt to admit that some things can be dangerous when used in nefarious ways. No one suggests we ban kitchen knives even though they are lethal, because their utility is massive, and outweighs their danger. In much the same way these models have extreme utility, that almost certainly outweighs their potential negatives.
- flycaliguy 4y ago
  I totally agree. People often argue that photoshop has been around forever and so on. Creating sophisticated pornographic video of any individual is brand new. Creating an app that realistically removes clothing from any photo is new technology. I actually just now came up with an idea for a browser plug-in that removes clothing from every image loaded.
  - echelon 4y ago
    And we're going to get very used to it in short order. We may make laws that prohibit online harassment, and that should be the mechanism we use to deal with this. Not through technology bans.
  - zhynn 4y ago
    The trolling terrifies me. Trolling someone by creating awful video (just think about how deeply, photo-realistically, awful it could be - porn is just the tip of the iceberg) is going to get really bad. I am not sure how this is going to shake out. The easiest will be video of famous people doing awful things. A little harder is doing a custom training on a particular person's likeness, and videos of that person doing awful things. That high-schooler. That child. It's not a happy idea. There should be severe consequences for deliberately making something like this with the intent to harass (troll). The fact is we have not even scratched the surface of classifying trolling as a real crime. I am less concerned with the tech (it's inevitable, hand wringing about it is not useful), and more concerned with the fact that we still have essentially no real consequences to this kind of harassment. I suspect that strong anonymity is incompatible with civilized life, since the few edgelords will always end up ruining it for the many. We have collectively decided that some amount of privacy must be sacrificed to live in a civilized place where you can address grievance (the subpoena must be served to someone). Surveillance is a weapon for tyranny, but I think that we need to flip the script. The relationship between tyranny and surveillance means we need better governments, not more anonymity. I also suspect we don't need to change anything except enforcement. I think trolls are a lot less anonymous than they think they are, since their opsec is typically nonexistent. It's just that we have no enforcers, and for some reason don't care. If I had a magic wand, I would convert the DEA wholesale over to dealing with online crimes (trolling, CP, trafficking, etc).

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

> There is a clear risk from these sorts of models as they get better - I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images Been possible on home computers for 31 years for anyone who actually wants to do it. It literally doesn't matter and I think Stability has proven that the "AI Ethics" part of these models was essentially meaningless busy work at best, and at worse stealing compute credits from users like Dall-E purposefully charging you with something you didn't ask for. Once every home computer can make the fake images AI Ethicists larp about then the power of fake images disappears because everyone knows not to trust them. It only has power if only a few can make them and never told the world it was even possible.

TuringTest 4y ago
Nobody should trust faked quotes attributed to celebrities or ethnic groups in Twitter or Whatsapp, yet these fakes have ruined political campaigns and led to mass killings. Society doesn't adapt in the way you suggest by people disregarding what you think is irrelevant.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  Don't try to use open internet platforms for your political campaigns. I think "feedback" in that case is justified. People defended themselves against propaganda. The campaigns have ruined themselves. I am not sure about mass killings. Some say that Facebook enabled a genocide in Myanmar, but I think that is a false hypothesis. It was used as a platform by conflicting parties, sure, but it wasn't the reason for the conflict. Google has strong governmental ties right now, so opposing any of their messages regardless of content seems sensible. Without backlash it would just fortify the situation right now so it has to be costly for both Google and political parties. Google lost a lot of trust in recent years, sadly that is not true for their market influence. Perhaps they put out these message because government contracts require it, the user wouldn't know because that is not transparent.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  > Society doesn't adapt in the way you suggest by people disregarding what you think is irrelevant. It's not what I think, it's what has been proven in the 32 years since photoshop was invented. What killings are you talking about that were caused by the existence of image manipulation?

i_like_apis 4y ago

I agree. Convincing fake content will eventually make us doubt our own history, let alone news media and current events. That concerns me, but I don’t think holding this tech back helps. But those aren’t the issues they claim are concerning to them. It’s just stupid identity politics. They want their model to lie to us about the world and say things like everyone is equally likely to any attribute. They have a “reality” problem apparently.

colordrops 4y ago

> recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images (or even worse, video). We’re not at that point yet Yes we are. There have been papers coming out on this tech for years now, with even the south park people doing videos using it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM

matheusmoreira 4y ago

These "risks" only exist because people somehow came to believe they actually have control over their "likeness". They don't. They never had. It's an illusion. The only risk here is exposing this for the lie it is. Maybe once it's trivially easy to copy someone else's "likeness", society will finally be able to accept it and evolve past it.

echelon 4y ago
Well said. Biological twins have never had control over this. If one twin wants to be a porn star, there's nothing the other can do. Edit: one could imagine a future dystopia where clones are created to bypass "identity IP".

bufferoverflow 4y ago

> I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images (or even worse, video). We’re not at that point yet Yes, we are. Open source stable diffusion can be trained on any person's images, as long as you have around 20 from different angles. Costs around 50 cents on rented GPUs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqeo3oDP6Qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqeo3oDP6Qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m__xadX0z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m__xadX0z0

hda2 4y ago
And people will get accustomed to (i.e. not take seriously) these new AI-generated images like they have with photoshopped images. "Ethicists" act like society will somehow not adapt to this tech like they have with all the tech that came before it. I put ethicists in quotes because the arguments they use don't hold up to scrutiny and don't seem to be motivated by real ethical concerns. At least not to me.
- mekkkkkk 4y ago
  I think your are right about society adapting to this tech, and I don't think these AI technologies can or should be contained. But. The Photoshop argument is a bit tiresome. AI will bring about a fundamental shift in content creation and it will disrupt how we treat media as a whole. Photoshop and other manual technologies are naturally gatekept by the required skill, effort and source images. Once AI media generation matures, all that goes out the window. Anyone will be able to convincingly fake anything with almost no effort and zero traceability. That shouldn't be downplayed. The concerns are real.