9 ms·

I am a programmer who has written extensively on my blog and HN against Copilot. I am also not a hypocrite; I do not like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion either. A

I am a programmer who has written extensively on my blog and HN against Copilot. I am also not a hypocrite; I do not like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion either. As a sibling comment implies, these AI tools give more power to people who control data, i.e., big companies or wealthy people, while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Copilot is bad for society. DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are bad for society. I don't know what the answer is, but I sure wish I had the resources to sue these powerful entities.

williamcotton 4y ago
I’m a programmer and a songwriter and I am not worried about these tools and I don’t think they are bad for society. What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? What did the recording do to the live musician? Here’s some highfalutin art theory on the matter, from almost a hundred years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  But this isn’t like photography and portrait artistry. This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. Stable Diffusion has literally been used to create new art by screenshotting someone’s live-streamed art creation process as the seed. While creating derivative work has always been considered art(such as deletion poetry and collage), it’s extremely uncommon and blasé to never attribute the original(s).
  - insanitybit 4y ago
    > This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid. If I parody your work, that's my work. If you paint a picture of a building and I go to that spot and take a photograph of that building it is my work. I can derive all sorts of things, things that I own, from things that others have made. Fair use is a thing: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ As for talking about the originals, would an artist credit every piece of inspiration they have ever encountered over a lifetime? Publishing a seed seems fine as a nice thing to do, but pointing at the billion pictures that went into the drawing seems silly.
    - tremon 4y ago
      Fair use is an affirmative defense. Others can still sue you for copying, and you will have to hope a judge agrees with your defense. How do you think Google v. Oracle would have turned out if Google's defense was "no your honor, we didn't copy the Java sources. We just used those sources as input to our creative algorithms, and this is what they independently produced"? If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid "valid", how? You still have to pay royalties to the copyright holder of the original song, and you don't get to claim it as your own.
      - stale2002 4y ago
        Nobody is suing anybody over AI art yet. Until there are a large amount of court cases, the burden of proof is on you to say that this is copyright infringement.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      If you sing over a song you’re adding your own voice. If you photograph a building that’s your own photograph, where decisions like lighting and framing are creative choices. If you paint a picture of a building that’s your own picture. An artist should credit when they are directly taking from another artist. Erasure poems don’t quite work if the poet runs around claiming they created the poem that was being erased. But more importantly SD allows you to take and use existing copyright works and funny-launder them and pass them off as your own, even though you don’t own the rights to that work. This would be more akin to I take a photograph you made and sell it on a t shirt on red bubble. I don’t actually own the IP to do that with.
- ghoward 4y ago
  Do you know what's different about the photograph or the recording? They are still their own separate works! If a painter paints a person for commission, and then that person also commissions a photographer to take a picture of them, is the photographer infringing on the copyright of the painter? Absolutely not; the works are separate. If a recording artist records a public domain song that another artist performs live, is the recording artist infringing on the live artist? Heavens, no; the works are separate. On the other hand, these "AI's" are taking existing works and reusing them. Say I write a song, and in that song, I use one stanza from the chorus of one of your songs. Verbatim. Would you have a copyright claim against me for that? Of course, you would! That's what these AI's do; they copy portions and mix them. Sometimes they are not substantial portions. Sometimes, they are, with verbatim comments (code), identical structure (also code), watermarks (images), composition (also images), lyrics (songs), or motifs (also songs). In the reverse of your painter and photographer example, we saw US courts hand down judgment against an artist who blatantly copied a photograph. [1] Anyway, that's the difference between the tools of photography (creates a new thing) and sound recording (creates a new thing) versus AI (mixes existing things). And yes, sound mixing can easily stray into copyright infringement. So can other copying of various copyrightable things. I'm not saying humans don't infringe; I'm saying that AI does by construction. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-hears-arguments-andy-warhol-copyright-dispute-2022-10-12/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-hears-argu...
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    I'm not sure sure that originality is that different between a human and a neural network. That is to say that what a human artist is doing has always involved a lot of mixing of existing creations. Art needs to have a certain level of familiarity in order to be understood by an audience. I didn't invent 4/4 time or a I-IV-V progression and I certainly wasn't the first person to tackle the rhyme schemes or subject matter of my songs. I wouldn't be surprised if there were fragments from other songs in my lyrics or melodies, either from something I heard a long time ago or perhaps just out of coincidence. There's only so much you can do with a folk song to begin with! BTW, what happened after the photograph is that there were less portrait artists. And after the recording there were less live musicians. There are certainly no less artists nor musicians, though!
- snarfy 4y ago
  > What did the recording do to the live musician? The recording destroyed the occupation of being a live musician. People still do it for what amounts to tip money, but it used to be a real job that people could make a living off of. If you had a business and wanted to differentiate it by having music, you had to pay people to play it live. It was the only way.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    It also gave birth to the recording artist. It certainly didn’t get rid of musicians.
- __alexs 4y ago
  > What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? It completely destroyed the jobs of photo realistic portrait artists. You only have stylised portrait painting now and now that is going to be ripped off too.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    It also gave birth to the photographic portrait artist. It certainly did not get rid of portrait artists in general. This was of course a leading question. The point was to get you to think about what artists did in response to the photograph. They changed the way they paint. I'm positive that machine learning will also change the way that people create are and I am positive that it will only add to the rich tapestry of creative possibilities. There are still realistic portrait painters, after all, they're just not as numerous.
c7b 4y ago
> these AI tools give more power to people who control data, i.e., big companies or wealthy people, while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Not sure I agree, but I can at least see the point for Copilot and DALL-E - but Stable Diffusion? It's open source, it runs on (some) home-use laptops. How is that taking away power from indies? Just look at the sheer number of apps building on or extending SD that were published on HN, and that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. Quite a few of them at least looked like side projects by solo devs.
- ghoward 4y ago
  SD is better than the other two, but it will still centralize control. I imagine that Disney would take issue with SD if material that Disney owned the copyright to was used in SD. They would sue. SD would have to be taken off the market. Thus, Disney has the power to ensure that their copyrighted material remains protected from outside interests, and they can still create unique things that bring in audiences. Any small-time artist that produces something unique will find their material eaten up by SD in time, and then, because of the sheer number of people using SD, that original material will soon have companions that are like it because they are based on it in some form. Then, the original won't be as unique. Anyone using SD will not, by definition, be creating anything unique. And when it comes to art, music, photography, and movies, uniqueness is the best selling point; once something is not unique, it becomes worth less because something like it could be gotten somewhere else. SD still has the power to devalue original work; it just gives normal people that power on top of giving it to the big companies, while the original works of big companies remain safe because of their armies of lawyers.
  - c7b 4y ago
    > I imagine that Disney would take issue with SD if material that Disney owned the copyright to was used in SD. They would sue. SD would have to be taken off the market. Are you sure? I'm not familiar with the exact data set they used for SD and whether or not Disney art was included, but my understanding is that their claim to legality comes from arguing that the use of images as training data is 'fair use'. Anyone can use Disney art for their projects as long as it's fair use, so even if they happened to not include Disney art in SD, it doesn't fully validate your point, because they could have done so if they wanted. As long as training constitutes fair use, which I think it should - it's pretty much the AI equivalent of 'looking at others' works', which is part of a human artist's training as well.
akudha 4y ago
but I sure wish I had the resources to sue these powerful entities. I wonder if there is a crowdfunding platform like gofundme, for lawsuits. Or can gofundme itself can be used for this purpose? It would be fantastic to sue the mega polluters, lying media like Fox etc. That said, even with a lot of money, are these cases winnable? Especially given the current state of Supreme Court and other federal courts?
cmdialog 4y ago
Obviously this is a matter of philosophy. I am using Copilot as an assistant, and for that it works out very nicely. It's fancy code completion. I don't know who is trying to use this to write non-trivial code but that's as bad an idea as trying to pass off writing AI "prompts" as a type of engineering. These things are tools to make more involved things. You're not going to be remembered for all the AI art you prompted into existence, no matter how many "good ones" you manage to generate. No one is going to put you into the Guggenheim for it. Likewise, programmers aren't going to become more depraved or something by using Copilot. I think that kind of prescriptive purism needs to Go Away Forever, personally.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I think the methods can be unsavory even if the result is nice. Yes, the way Copilot was trained was morally questionable, but probably legaly fine (Github terms of service). There is no doubt the result is extremely helpful though.
vghfgk1000 4y ago
The best proposal I’ve heard to deal with the societal/economic problems this sort of A.I. poses were made by Jaron Lanier: https://youtu.be/rGqiswuJuQI?t=1190 https://youtu.be/rGqiswuJuQI?t=1190 …I can see why his proposals of providing (micro-)compensation to people whose tremendous efforts end up being mined by these algorithms would not be popular with researchers/companies who stand to benefit vastly (…presumably including the investors who own this site?). The lobbying power/political power/ awareness/financial resources of your average (atomised) artist/programmer/musician etc. is pretty much nil in comparison… Forgive the clumsy analogy, but I have a feeling the whole thing might end up something like a haulage company that doesn’t want to pay any taxes to help fix the roads though?
epolanski 4y ago
What makes them bad? I am against Copilot because Microsoft is training the models with public data disregarding copyright (also, doesn't include it's own code).
- ghoward 4y ago
  Because they centralize control, as I said in [1]. Put another way, AI's are tools that give more power to already powerful entities. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227303
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Not the OP but I have a sinking feeling that these AI tools are going to take away from the most enjoyable careers and creative pursuits and leave us with only mundane button pusher AI supervisor jobs. Current AI is not replacing anything yet but I feel we are only a few years before AI can do a better job at drawing or programming than someone with years of practice. Sure, you can utilise those tools to stay ahead. But will AI prompt engineer be as emotionally satisfying as drawing for real?
  - woah 4y ago
    It seems like these AI tools, if anything, will take away the least enjoyable parts of creative careers. Artists will less time thinking about how to adjust a camera lens or mix paints, and more time thinking about how to tell a story that connects with people. Programmers will spend less time banging out boilerplate, and more time thinking about system design.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      AI isn’t replacing camera usage or paint mixing. It’s replacing the years of learning to draw with prompt engineering. Like how the camera obsoleted the art of realistic painting, I feel that AI will replace the art of drawing. Which is something I like doing. But I like doing it because it’s hard but with purpose. It’s not satisfying to painstakingly work on something that I could have generated with an AI in seconds.
csallen 4y ago
> while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Stable Diffusion and DALL-E give a ton of power to individuals, hence why they are popular. It feels like you're doing a cost analysis instead of a cost-benefit analysis, i.e. you're only looking at the negatives. It's a bit like saying cars are bad because they give more power to the big companies who sell them + put horse and buggy operators out of a job.
- ghoward 4y ago
  I explained more in my comment at [1]. The big difference is that cars were a tool that helped regular people by being a force multiplier. Stable Diffusion and DALL-E are not force multipliers in the same way. Sure, you may now produce images that you couldn't before, but there are far fewer profitable uses for images than for cars. Images don't materially affect the world, but cars can. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227303
  - csallen 4y ago
    This isn't super convincing to me. You're basically predicting that some new innovation will be limited in its usefulness, but you have no real way of knowing that, because the variables are too complex. This is why we have a market. We let billions of individuals vote on what they think is useful or not, in real-time, multiple times a day, every day. If AI-generated images are less desirable than what came before, then people won't use them or pay to use them in the long run. They'll die like other flash-in-the-pan fads have died, artists will retain their jobs en masse, and OpenAI won't gain much if any power. The entire idea of the market is to ensure that if some entity is gaining money/power, that's happening as a result of it providing some commensurate good to the people. And if that's not happening, or if the power is too great, that's why we have laws and regulatory bodies.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Thankfully, Stable Diffusion is on thousands of hard drives, so the genie can't be put back in the bottle.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I don’t think anyone believes it’s possible. Even the “ai ethicists” have to realise this. We can still acknowledge that these tools can be bad for society while knowing they can’t be stopped.

williamcotton 4y ago

I’m a programmer and a songwriter and I am not worried about these tools and I don’t think they are bad for society. What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? What did the recording do to the live musician? Here’s some highfalutin art theory on the matter, from almost a hundred years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
But this isn’t like photography and portrait artistry. This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. Stable Diffusion has literally been used to create new art by screenshotting someone’s live-streamed art creation process as the seed. While creating derivative work has always been considered art(such as deletion poetry and collage), it’s extremely uncommon and blasé to never attribute the original(s).
- insanitybit 4y ago
  > This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid. If I parody your work, that's my work. If you paint a picture of a building and I go to that spot and take a photograph of that building it is my work. I can derive all sorts of things, things that I own, from things that others have made. Fair use is a thing: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ As for talking about the originals, would an artist credit every piece of inspiration they have ever encountered over a lifetime? Publishing a seed seems fine as a nice thing to do, but pointing at the billion pictures that went into the drawing seems silly.
  - tremon 4y ago
    Fair use is an affirmative defense. Others can still sue you for copying, and you will have to hope a judge agrees with your defense. How do you think Google v. Oracle would have turned out if Google's defense was "no your honor, we didn't copy the Java sources. We just used those sources as input to our creative algorithms, and this is what they independently produced"? If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid "valid", how? You still have to pay royalties to the copyright holder of the original song, and you don't get to claim it as your own.
    - stale2002 4y ago
      Nobody is suing anybody over AI art yet. Until there are a large amount of court cases, the burden of proof is on you to say that this is copyright infringement.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    If you sing over a song you’re adding your own voice. If you photograph a building that’s your own photograph, where decisions like lighting and framing are creative choices. If you paint a picture of a building that’s your own picture. An artist should credit when they are directly taking from another artist. Erasure poems don’t quite work if the poet runs around claiming they created the poem that was being erased. But more importantly SD allows you to take and use existing copyright works and funny-launder them and pass them off as your own, even though you don’t own the rights to that work. This would be more akin to I take a photograph you made and sell it on a t shirt on red bubble. I don’t actually own the IP to do that with.
ghoward 4y ago
Do you know what's different about the photograph or the recording? They are still their own separate works! If a painter paints a person for commission, and then that person also commissions a photographer to take a picture of them, is the photographer infringing on the copyright of the painter? Absolutely not; the works are separate. If a recording artist records a public domain song that another artist performs live, is the recording artist infringing on the live artist? Heavens, no; the works are separate. On the other hand, these "AI's" are taking existing works and reusing them. Say I write a song, and in that song, I use one stanza from the chorus of one of your songs. Verbatim. Would you have a copyright claim against me for that? Of course, you would! That's what these AI's do; they copy portions and mix them. Sometimes they are not substantial portions. Sometimes, they are, with verbatim comments (code), identical structure (also code), watermarks (images), composition (also images), lyrics (songs), or motifs (also songs). In the reverse of your painter and photographer example, we saw US courts hand down judgment against an artist who blatantly copied a photograph. [1] Anyway, that's the difference between the tools of photography (creates a new thing) and sound recording (creates a new thing) versus AI (mixes existing things). And yes, sound mixing can easily stray into copyright infringement. So can other copying of various copyrightable things. I'm not saying humans don't infringe; I'm saying that AI does by construction. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-hears-arguments-andy-warhol-copyright-dispute-2022-10-12/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-hears-argu...
- williamcotton 4y ago
  I'm not sure sure that originality is that different between a human and a neural network. That is to say that what a human artist is doing has always involved a lot of mixing of existing creations. Art needs to have a certain level of familiarity in order to be understood by an audience. I didn't invent 4/4 time or a I-IV-V progression and I certainly wasn't the first person to tackle the rhyme schemes or subject matter of my songs. I wouldn't be surprised if there were fragments from other songs in my lyrics or melodies, either from something I heard a long time ago or perhaps just out of coincidence. There's only so much you can do with a folk song to begin with! BTW, what happened after the photograph is that there were less portrait artists. And after the recording there were less live musicians. There are certainly no less artists nor musicians, though!
snarfy 4y ago
> What did the recording do to the live musician? The recording destroyed the occupation of being a live musician. People still do it for what amounts to tip money, but it used to be a real job that people could make a living off of. If you had a business and wanted to differentiate it by having music, you had to pay people to play it live. It was the only way.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  It also gave birth to the recording artist. It certainly didn’t get rid of musicians.
__alexs 4y ago
> What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? It completely destroyed the jobs of photo realistic portrait artists. You only have stylised portrait painting now and now that is going to be ripped off too.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  It also gave birth to the photographic portrait artist. It certainly did not get rid of portrait artists in general. This was of course a leading question. The point was to get you to think about what artists did in response to the photograph. They changed the way they paint. I'm positive that machine learning will also change the way that people create are and I am positive that it will only add to the rich tapestry of creative possibilities. There are still realistic portrait painters, after all, they're just not as numerous.

c7b 4y ago

> these AI tools give more power to people who control data, i.e., big companies or wealthy people, while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Not sure I agree, but I can at least see the point for Copilot and DALL-E - but Stable Diffusion? It's open source, it runs on (some) home-use laptops. How is that taking away power from indies? Just look at the sheer number of apps building on or extending SD that were published on HN, and that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. Quite a few of them at least looked like side projects by solo devs.

ghoward 4y ago
SD is better than the other two, but it will still centralize control. I imagine that Disney would take issue with SD if material that Disney owned the copyright to was used in SD. They would sue. SD would have to be taken off the market. Thus, Disney has the power to ensure that their copyrighted material remains protected from outside interests, and they can still create unique things that bring in audiences. Any small-time artist that produces something unique will find their material eaten up by SD in time, and then, because of the sheer number of people using SD, that original material will soon have companions that are like it because they are based on it in some form. Then, the original won't be as unique. Anyone using SD will not, by definition, be creating anything unique. And when it comes to art, music, photography, and movies, uniqueness is the best selling point; once something is not unique, it becomes worth less because something like it could be gotten somewhere else. SD still has the power to devalue original work; it just gives normal people that power on top of giving it to the big companies, while the original works of big companies remain safe because of their armies of lawyers.
- c7b 4y ago
  > I imagine that Disney would take issue with SD if material that Disney owned the copyright to was used in SD. They would sue. SD would have to be taken off the market. Are you sure? I'm not familiar with the exact data set they used for SD and whether or not Disney art was included, but my understanding is that their claim to legality comes from arguing that the use of images as training data is 'fair use'. Anyone can use Disney art for their projects as long as it's fair use, so even if they happened to not include Disney art in SD, it doesn't fully validate your point, because they could have done so if they wanted. As long as training constitutes fair use, which I think it should - it's pretty much the AI equivalent of 'looking at others' works', which is part of a human artist's training as well.

akudha 4y ago

but I sure wish I had the resources to sue these powerful entities. I wonder if there is a crowdfunding platform like gofundme, for lawsuits. Or can gofundme itself can be used for this purpose? It would be fantastic to sue the mega polluters, lying media like Fox etc. That said, even with a lot of money, are these cases winnable? Especially given the current state of Supreme Court and other federal courts?

cmdialog 4y ago

Obviously this is a matter of philosophy. I am using Copilot as an assistant, and for that it works out very nicely. It's fancy code completion. I don't know who is trying to use this to write non-trivial code but that's as bad an idea as trying to pass off writing AI "prompts" as a type of engineering. These things are tools to make more involved things. You're not going to be remembered for all the AI art you prompted into existence, no matter how many "good ones" you manage to generate. No one is going to put you into the Guggenheim for it. Likewise, programmers aren't going to become more depraved or something by using Copilot. I think that kind of prescriptive purism needs to Go Away Forever, personally.

Aeolun 4y ago
I think the methods can be unsavory even if the result is nice. Yes, the way Copilot was trained was morally questionable, but probably legaly fine (Github terms of service). There is no doubt the result is extremely helpful though.

vghfgk1000 4y ago

The best proposal I’ve heard to deal with the societal/economic problems this sort of A.I. poses were made by Jaron Lanier: https://youtu.be/rGqiswuJuQI?t=1190 https://youtu.be/rGqiswuJuQI?t=1190 …I can see why his proposals of providing (micro-)compensation to people whose tremendous efforts end up being mined by these algorithms would not be popular with researchers/companies who stand to benefit vastly (…presumably including the investors who own this site?). The lobbying power/political power/ awareness/financial resources of your average (atomised) artist/programmer/musician etc. is pretty much nil in comparison… Forgive the clumsy analogy, but I have a feeling the whole thing might end up something like a haulage company that doesn’t want to pay any taxes to help fix the roads though?

epolanski 4y ago

What makes them bad? I am against Copilot because Microsoft is training the models with public data disregarding copyright (also, doesn't include it's own code).

ghoward 4y ago
Because they centralize control, as I said in [1]. Put another way, AI's are tools that give more power to already powerful entities. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227303
Gigachad 4y ago
Not the OP but I have a sinking feeling that these AI tools are going to take away from the most enjoyable careers and creative pursuits and leave us with only mundane button pusher AI supervisor jobs. Current AI is not replacing anything yet but I feel we are only a few years before AI can do a better job at drawing or programming than someone with years of practice. Sure, you can utilise those tools to stay ahead. But will AI prompt engineer be as emotionally satisfying as drawing for real?
- woah 4y ago
  It seems like these AI tools, if anything, will take away the least enjoyable parts of creative careers. Artists will less time thinking about how to adjust a camera lens or mix paints, and more time thinking about how to tell a story that connects with people. Programmers will spend less time banging out boilerplate, and more time thinking about system design.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    AI isn’t replacing camera usage or paint mixing. It’s replacing the years of learning to draw with prompt engineering. Like how the camera obsoleted the art of realistic painting, I feel that AI will replace the art of drawing. Which is something I like doing. But I like doing it because it’s hard but with purpose. It’s not satisfying to painstakingly work on something that I could have generated with an AI in seconds.

csallen 4y ago

> while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Stable Diffusion and DALL-E give a ton of power to individuals, hence why they are popular. It feels like you're doing a cost analysis instead of a cost-benefit analysis, i.e. you're only looking at the negatives. It's a bit like saying cars are bad because they give more power to the big companies who sell them + put horse and buggy operators out of a job.

ghoward 4y ago
I explained more in my comment at [1]. The big difference is that cars were a tool that helped regular people by being a force multiplier. Stable Diffusion and DALL-E are not force multipliers in the same way. Sure, you may now produce images that you couldn't before, but there are far fewer profitable uses for images than for cars. Images don't materially affect the world, but cars can. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227303
- csallen 4y ago
  This isn't super convincing to me. You're basically predicting that some new innovation will be limited in its usefulness, but you have no real way of knowing that, because the variables are too complex. This is why we have a market. We let billions of individuals vote on what they think is useful or not, in real-time, multiple times a day, every day. If AI-generated images are less desirable than what came before, then people won't use them or pay to use them in the long run. They'll die like other flash-in-the-pan fads have died, artists will retain their jobs en masse, and OpenAI won't gain much if any power. The entire idea of the market is to ensure that if some entity is gaining money/power, that's happening as a result of it providing some commensurate good to the people. And if that's not happening, or if the power is too great, that's why we have laws and regulatory bodies.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

Thankfully, Stable Diffusion is on thousands of hard drives, so the genie can't be put back in the bottle.

Gigachad 4y ago
I don’t think anyone believes it’s possible. Even the “ai ethicists” have to realise this. We can still acknowledge that these tools can be bad for society while knowing they can’t be stopped.