11 ms·

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/xzdkio/stablediffusion_bans_prominent_opensource/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/xzdkio/stab.

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/xzdkio/stablediffusion_bans_prominent_opensource/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/xzdkio/stab... apparently, there is a separate drama about hacking at SD and accusations of ownership of code.

minimaxir 4y ago
That drama is most likely the catalyst of the current drama. (i.e. StabilityAI getting control of the subreddit to control the NAI leak/discourage use of the AUTOMATIC1111 UI) Which violates a number of Reddit's conflict of interest rules for moderators.
- lrae 4y ago
  > Which violates a number of Reddit's conflict of interest rules for moderators. Those don't exist. There is something called the "Reddiquette" which is by the community and completely informal. Subreddits owned by companies is the new normal and if you look at games, most reddit users these days even prefer it to community-run ones. Not uncommon to have two subreddits at a launch of a game and the unofficial one will always "lose". Besides that, Reddit itself reaches out to brands & product owners and influencers to make official subs for them, managed by those entities then. Subreddits are the new Facebook Groups and Reddit is completely "mainstream". I wonder what's next in a couple of years. Maybe we can go back to forums :)
  - dmonitor 4y ago
    > most reddit users these days even prefer it to community-run ones. Not uncommon to have two subreddits at a launch of a game and the unofficial one will always "lose". Games often link to the "official" reddit community from inside the game, so no surprise that traffic will be driven there
    - lrae 4y ago
      Sure, they also share them on their socials and are vocal about it. But even besides that, if you look at any time this situation happened in the last ~3 years, you'll always see more users being vocal about the preferring the official sub than the community one in comparison. Reddit's demographics changed, and it just exploded over the last couple of years with "casual users", "went mainstream" or what ever one wants to call it. Most users these days don't even know that "official subreddits" were something that was super unpopular and uncommon on Reddit.
      - ZiiS 4y ago
        Eternal September
  - debugnik 4y ago
    > "Reddiquette" which is by the community and completely informal. It used to be official, although still informal. It was eventually relegated to an obscure page in their help desk, though.
twobitshifter 4y ago
Is NAI related to SD in any way?
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Different trained model, which was extracted from its creator via unauthorized system access and is illicitly available via BitTorrent. The drama appears to have started because an open-source developer who wrote a web frontend to control SD adapted that frontend to control the hacked model also, which has offended SD's CEO (because of the general principle of "Don't help software pirates"). The additional drama includes that said open-source author has looked at the leaked code and concluded that it stole some of his open source work in the way it tunes text parameters.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    Damn, Emad seems sort of clueless? Hard rules about software piracy like that feel very 90's and totally unnecessary. Just avoid explicitly condoning any projects and move past it! It will be old news in like 2 weeks at the current rate of things.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Given the dude spent half a million dollars on training SD, I wouldn't be surprised if even though he chose to open-source the trained model, he has strong opinions on whether people should have the right to choose to open-source such things vs. having third-party crackers breach their systems and publish for them.
      - nullc 4y ago
        Perhaps, but the model weights themselves are currently understood to be uncopyrightable, and it's pretty inconceivable that the model could become copyrightable without becoming a derivative work of the training data. Unless these AI companies want google and facebook to be literally the only companies in the world that can train large scale machine learning (by using their TOS to get licenses from their users) they should tread carefully. In this particular case the leaked code apparently exposed that the proprietary codebase was also using the OSS developer's work without attribution.
omgmajk 4y ago
Whew, spicy. This will be interesting to follow. Did the AMA happen already?
gfd 4y ago
Was there a dedicated HN submission for this topic? This is extremely fascinating to me. In what Andrej Karpathy calls "software 2.0"[1], leaking your model is equivalent to leaking the main IP of your company. Unlike source code where it loses value quickly out of context (e.g. twitch leaked their code yet that didn't spawn a bunch of twitch clones), models can be fine-tuned and transfer-learning-ed for many other purposes Since these models take millions of dollars to train, I see these sort of hacks becoming a thing! I wonder when companies will start adding "trap streets"[2] to prove that others are using their stolen models? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y57wwucbXR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y57wwucbXR8 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
- nonbirithm 4y ago
  I did actually submit a link to a GitHub issue about this, but it seems to have been blocked by HN. I can see the post title when I'm logged in but as a guest it doesn't show anything at all. The post wasn't even flagged as dead. It doesn't show up in my submitted links list when logged out either. I don't know if it tripped an internal filter on HN or something. Here is the link to the post in case you're curious. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146603 In case it matters I used the GitHub issue title as the name of the post - "Stable-diffusion-webui is using stolen code". Here is the actual link I posted. https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/issues/1936 https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/issu...
  - wsb_mod2 4y ago
    Showing up as a blank page for me. Fascinating. https://i.imgur.com/NzFX5Cz.png https://i.imgur.com/NzFX5Cz.png
    - nonbirithm 4y ago
      This is what it looks like for me. https://imgur.io/di80ueh https://imgur.io/di80ueh
    - 4y ago
jVinc 4y ago
This is such a weird drama. The way I read it SD was effectively trying to put pressure on a guy because he developed a popular UI for using SD, and made that UI also support another model. So all their moral grandstanding is effectively just about trying to keep the popular gateway site pointing only at them, but their throwing shit at the guy who gave them that huge free PR push... What an odd position, but understandable, it looks like the people behind SD are a bunch of amateurs who weren't ready for the widespread attention and rather than ride the wave they are trying to shut down the beaches to claim that they own the ocean.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Indeed it's a decision that feels like it was made in a tonedeaf echo chamber. As a rule of thumb, if it is allowed on GitHub then coders are probably okay with that, and individual companies will have to use the dmca process. This goes beyond that, taking the stance that by merely conforming your api to work with a user-provided proprietary checkpoint, you're in the wrong? This same philosophy forbids sharing open source game emulators, and we all know how that turned out (can be the best way to play a game).
- avereveard 4y ago
  it's seem a case of "build an audience and monetize later" except they gave the golden gose itself to the audience instead of the egg, now they're in "monetize later" and some rando's internet repo is more usable and has a better pipeline than their "dreamstudio", and to boot now these rare gtx aren't rare anymore thanks to the bitcoin crash, so enthusiast can readily use the model at home.
  - ronsor 4y ago
    Nitpick, but it's not so much the Bitcoin crash as it is Ethereum switching away from proof-of-work (GPU) mining.
    - russelg 4y ago
      The crash kicked off the GPU liquidations, POS switch sealed the deal.

minimaxir 4y ago

That drama is most likely the catalyst of the current drama. (i.e. StabilityAI getting control of the subreddit to control the NAI leak/discourage use of the AUTOMATIC1111 UI) Which violates a number of Reddit's conflict of interest rules for moderators.

lrae 4y ago
> Which violates a number of Reddit's conflict of interest rules for moderators. Those don't exist. There is something called the "Reddiquette" which is by the community and completely informal. Subreddits owned by companies is the new normal and if you look at games, most reddit users these days even prefer it to community-run ones. Not uncommon to have two subreddits at a launch of a game and the unofficial one will always "lose". Besides that, Reddit itself reaches out to brands & product owners and influencers to make official subs for them, managed by those entities then. Subreddits are the new Facebook Groups and Reddit is completely "mainstream". I wonder what's next in a couple of years. Maybe we can go back to forums :)
- dmonitor 4y ago
  > most reddit users these days even prefer it to community-run ones. Not uncommon to have two subreddits at a launch of a game and the unofficial one will always "lose". Games often link to the "official" reddit community from inside the game, so no surprise that traffic will be driven there
  - lrae 4y ago
    Sure, they also share them on their socials and are vocal about it. But even besides that, if you look at any time this situation happened in the last ~3 years, you'll always see more users being vocal about the preferring the official sub than the community one in comparison. Reddit's demographics changed, and it just exploded over the last couple of years with "casual users", "went mainstream" or what ever one wants to call it. Most users these days don't even know that "official subreddits" were something that was super unpopular and uncommon on Reddit.
    - ZiiS 4y ago
      Eternal September
- debugnik 4y ago
  > "Reddiquette" which is by the community and completely informal. It used to be official, although still informal. It was eventually relegated to an obscure page in their help desk, though.

twobitshifter 4y ago

Is NAI related to SD in any way?

shadowgovt 4y ago
Different trained model, which was extracted from its creator via unauthorized system access and is illicitly available via BitTorrent. The drama appears to have started because an open-source developer who wrote a web frontend to control SD adapted that frontend to control the hacked model also, which has offended SD's CEO (because of the general principle of "Don't help software pirates"). The additional drama includes that said open-source author has looked at the leaked code and concluded that it stole some of his open source work in the way it tunes text parameters.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Damn, Emad seems sort of clueless? Hard rules about software piracy like that feel very 90's and totally unnecessary. Just avoid explicitly condoning any projects and move past it! It will be old news in like 2 weeks at the current rate of things.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Given the dude spent half a million dollars on training SD, I wouldn't be surprised if even though he chose to open-source the trained model, he has strong opinions on whether people should have the right to choose to open-source such things vs. having third-party crackers breach their systems and publish for them.
    - nullc 4y ago
      Perhaps, but the model weights themselves are currently understood to be uncopyrightable, and it's pretty inconceivable that the model could become copyrightable without becoming a derivative work of the training data. Unless these AI companies want google and facebook to be literally the only companies in the world that can train large scale machine learning (by using their TOS to get licenses from their users) they should tread carefully. In this particular case the leaked code apparently exposed that the proprietary codebase was also using the OSS developer's work without attribution.

omgmajk 4y ago

Whew, spicy. This will be interesting to follow. Did the AMA happen already?

gfd 4y ago

Was there a dedicated HN submission for this topic? This is extremely fascinating to me. In what Andrej Karpathy calls "software 2.0"[1], leaking your model is equivalent to leaking the main IP of your company. Unlike source code where it loses value quickly out of context (e.g. twitch leaked their code yet that didn't spawn a bunch of twitch clones), models can be fine-tuned and transfer-learning-ed for many other purposes Since these models take millions of dollars to train, I see these sort of hacks becoming a thing! I wonder when companies will start adding "trap streets"[2] to prove that others are using their stolen models? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y57wwucbXR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y57wwucbXR8 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

nonbirithm 4y ago
I did actually submit a link to a GitHub issue about this, but it seems to have been blocked by HN. I can see the post title when I'm logged in but as a guest it doesn't show anything at all. The post wasn't even flagged as dead. It doesn't show up in my submitted links list when logged out either. I don't know if it tripped an internal filter on HN or something. Here is the link to the post in case you're curious. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146603 In case it matters I used the GitHub issue title as the name of the post - "Stable-diffusion-webui is using stolen code". Here is the actual link I posted. https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/issues/1936 https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/issu...
- wsb_mod2 4y ago
  Showing up as a blank page for me. Fascinating. https://i.imgur.com/NzFX5Cz.png https://i.imgur.com/NzFX5Cz.png
  - nonbirithm 4y ago
    This is what it looks like for me. https://imgur.io/di80ueh https://imgur.io/di80ueh
  - 4y ago

jVinc 4y ago

This is such a weird drama. The way I read it SD was effectively trying to put pressure on a guy because he developed a popular UI for using SD, and made that UI also support another model. So all their moral grandstanding is effectively just about trying to keep the popular gateway site pointing only at them, but their throwing shit at the guy who gave them that huge free PR push... What an odd position, but understandable, it looks like the people behind SD are a bunch of amateurs who weren't ready for the widespread attention and rather than ride the wave they are trying to shut down the beaches to claim that they own the ocean.

ShamelessC 4y ago
Indeed it's a decision that feels like it was made in a tonedeaf echo chamber. As a rule of thumb, if it is allowed on GitHub then coders are probably okay with that, and individual companies will have to use the dmca process. This goes beyond that, taking the stance that by merely conforming your api to work with a user-provided proprietary checkpoint, you're in the wrong? This same philosophy forbids sharing open source game emulators, and we all know how that turned out (can be the best way to play a game).
avereveard 4y ago
it's seem a case of "build an audience and monetize later" except they gave the golden gose itself to the audience instead of the egg, now they're in "monetize later" and some rando's internet repo is more usable and has a better pipeline than their "dreamstudio", and to boot now these rare gtx aren't rare anymore thanks to the bitcoin crash, so enthusiast can readily use the model at home.
- ronsor 4y ago
  Nitpick, but it's not so much the Bitcoin crash as it is Ethereum switching away from proof-of-work (GPU) mining.
  - russelg 4y ago
    The crash kicked off the GPU liquidations, POS switch sealed the deal.