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I'm not a data hoarder, but from the moment Stable Diffusion was released I had a gut feeling that I should download everything available while it's there. Som

I'm not a data hoarder, but from the moment Stable Diffusion was released I had a gut feeling that I should download everything available while it's there. Somewhat similar gut feeling to when popcorn time was released, although it might not be exactly the same. While I really wish I'm wrong, my gut tells me that broadly trained machine learning models available to the general public won't last and that intellectual property hawks are going to one day cancel and remove these models and code from all convenient access channels. That somehow international legislation will converge on the strictest possible interpretation of intellectual property, and those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material. So reminder to everyone: Download! Get it and use it before they try to close the Stable doors after the horses Diffused. Do not be fooled by the illusion that just because it's open source it will be there forever! Popcorn time lost a similar battle. Get it now when there are trustworthy sources. Once these kinds of things go underground, it gets much harder to get a trustworthy version.

Satam 4y ago
Wow, thank you. That's a very interesting take. You mention Popcorn time. I wonder if torrents in general could be a great example of how something like this plays out? Torrenting took the world by storm and had an amazing "product-market fit" for the early internet days. Of course, downloading copyrighted material was always illegal but that didn't stop many. Over time, legal but paid alternatives rose up: Spotify, iTunes, Netflix. These players found their place in the market by balancing the interest of copyright holders and the needs of users looking for cheap and easy access to entertainment. Just as Netflix acquired large content libraries, same here. With enough money, large training datasets could be acquired in a legally solid manner. It's interesting to think where this analogy might fail as well, and how the paths of these technologies could differ. For one, torrenting was mostly for entertainment, and thus impacted B2C first. On the other hand, language models are more so for media _creation_ and the B2B sphere.
- machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  They can and do fight dirty. They don't only use legal tactics, they use legal options to get the information off from trustworthy sources. Like torrents, you first have to resort to random websites who get randomly taken down as they acquire reputation. If a person takes the face and responsibility for something, he gets litigated into oblivion. So you get to the point where trustworthy and untrustworthy sources are indistinguishable . Now what they do is create untrustworthy sources. Like time for popcorn. Sow discord. Fork several times, create intentionally malwared versions of both the program and the website. Keep kicking off the trustworthy sources of search engines, while magically skipping takedown requests for the less trustworthy websites. Find ways to break old versions if possible, just to force them to keep moving. (they can make gradio randomly change APIs just to break the old trustworthy versions) All of this can happen.
  - JohnnyNewhouse 4y ago
    Fight dirty, you say? Capital idea. Let's see, the principals of any company or trade group that try litigating model providers "into oblivion" can have some more legal fun when synthetic images of them diddling their kids find their way to law enforcement or local vigilante organisations. And for anyone too squeamish for that, there should be a way to use the tech to do a really good SWATing for suspected murder -- bit of fine-tuning on screenshots from ISIS and Mexican drug gang videos, etcetera. Before this gets flagged to oblivion, this is obvious. You just have to recognise that the "regulators" and industry insiders Emad is trying to "shield" you from are enemies and ask yourself, how do I hurt them?
  - itsoktocry 4y ago
    >All of this can happen. And reasonably technical people have zero issues, as it should be. Media piracy has been abundant my entire life. It's never slowed down or become inaccessable.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "Over time, legal but paid alternatives rose up: Spotify, iTunes, Netflix. These players found their place in the market by balancing the interest of copyright holders and the needs of users looking for cheap and easy access to entertainment." You didn't mention one of the largest (perhaps even the largest) distributor of copyright content (which happens to also be free, for now): YouTube. You can watch/listen to endless amounts of copyrighted content (and other types of content) on there completely for free, and to say it's tremendously popular would be an understatement. Google has made it work through ads. Perhaps something like that will happen with image-generating AI.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Notably Youtube contained rampant copyright infringement in the early years, but to be able to hold their market position gradually pivoted to a system that treats existing large copyright holders preferentially and clamps down on everyone else.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      It still holds rampant copyright infringement.
fbdab103 4y ago
Any particular repos/artifacts you suggest downloading?
- lostmsu 4y ago
  YALM 100B, and that giant codegen model from Salesforce https://huggingface.co/Salesforce https://huggingface.co/Salesforce
zakki 4y ago
can you point the good source to download? thanks.
- Stagnant 4y ago
  Hugging face is the original source for most of the latest models, including the latest Stable Diffusion v1.5[1] [1]: https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5
- a1369209993 4y ago
  Can't find a working link for 1.5, but for anyone who cares, I did turn up https://rentry.org/voldy https://rentry.org/voldy, which has a actually-working link for SD 1.4[0] (in addition to the huggingface paywall) as well as to a couple other compatible models including NovelAI. 0: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3a4a612d75ed088ea542acac52f9f45987488d1c&dn=sd-v1-4.ckpt&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.opentrackr.org%3a1337
  - osanseviero 4y ago
    Hugging Face has no paywall
    - emikulic 4y ago
      You have to create an account and agree to some stuff and be logged in but you're correct that you don't have to pay.
      - a1369209993 4y ago
        > You have to create an account and agree to some stuff and be logged in So a paywall. I agree it's a annoyingly misleading term for the concept and would be happy to hear better alternatives[0], but I haven't found one yet. 0: like eg "passphrase" instead of "password" or "assuming the conclusion" instead of "begging the question" for their respective concepts
green_on_black 4y ago
Here's a (not-recommended but amusing) nuclear option: Tit-for-tat. Regulators and artists don't want this? Okay, include in all open source software licenses that regulators and artists are now barred from using them without payment.
- beojan 4y ago
  A lot of open source software authors don't want this either because it can circumvent copyleft and attribution requirements. Also, discriminating like you suggest would make those licenses closed source by definition.
  - green_on_black 4y ago
    I'm glad you're responding with real issues, though let me reiterate that my comment was more to amuse and vent. Long live clopen source!
  - amelius 4y ago
    > Also, discriminating like you suggest would make those licenses closed source by definition. Definitions are not what matters in the end. Why doesn't the viral and restrictive element of GNU's GPL license make the license "non-open"?
    - beojan 4y ago
      Definitions are what matter, they're the reason you can use words and I can understand what you mean by them. "Open source" has a definition (https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd) and the GPL meets it, because it doesn't prevent derived worries from being distributed under the same license.
  - wnkrshm 4y ago
    Interestingly it's the same with attribution requirements for art, but since it's not written words, nobody can claim: "this part is exactly my GPL code". But with art it's "this is exactly how I do texture on metal", "this is exactly how I paint steampunk greeble", "this is how I do clouds" etc.
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
Companies have a similar problem now with AI than what the music labels had with Napster and MP3s in the 90's. Music labels tried very hard to legislate the problem away but it failed. I remember Metallica's Lars Ulrich working hard to fight it. They finally embraced the change. If it can't be done in the U.S., it will be done in some other country. That country will have the competitive advantage. We'll go thru the same with AI but ultimately it won't be stopped. As long as there's no world wide coordination limiting its impact, AI will continue its course.
- azinman2 4y ago
  How did he embrace the change? I just remember years of lawsuits and whatnot.
  - andirk 4y ago
    He sued his fans and no he has no fans?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - learn-forever 4y ago
    People are now happily listening to Metallica on streaming services
- squokko 4y ago
  They did legislate the problem away. Sure, Spotify and YouTube play a part in the reduced music piracy today. But it also helps that all of the music piracy sites have been killed, and the only ones left are shady enough that you fear malware if you go there.
  - Garlef 4y ago
    It's streaming that killed piracy. And even piracy was only partially to avoid paying money: It was a huge UX win over CDs. The iPod would not have had the impact it had without piracy.
pabs3 4y ago
Models that are trained on data under open source licenses (such as Creative Commons) would likely be much safer from copyright claims. I like to use the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning Policy to evaluate the openness of ML work. https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Unless they carry with them a library of attributions to every source image, that safety comes mostly from anticipating that authors of CC-licensed works won't be too upset about people using them.
tarunmuvvala 4y ago
Stability AI is formed with that vision to keep is open-source and accessible to the masses. It's very rare that we might see it becoming a closed source
- gedy 4y ago
  But it might eventually be neutered with filtering out "problematic" content from the models. Maybe that's NSFW now, but then could easily have busybodies start pressing for "bias" and other topics to be removed.
  - neonsunset 4y ago
    Someone here put it very well to watch out how the masses would try to censor AI-produced content into oblivion in their futile pursuit of trying to shoot the messenger.
seydor 4y ago
what if the models are used to generate a new training set ?
- visarga 4y ago
  About 150m images have been generated with SD so far. That's already a new large scale training set. Generate and curate before retraining to create a virtuous cycle.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    This looks more like polluting the training set to me.
- fredoliveira 4y ago
  > That somehow international legislation will converge on the strictest possible interpretation of intellectual property, and those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material. Doesn't this ultimately result in local maxima? All the biases get reinforced and all the novelty (things the system hasn't seen/produced yet) goes away. A tiny example: Dall-E (and SD) both struggled with eye positioning, for example. Wouldn't training a model on their output then reinforce that particular bias of poorly positioning eyes? Now multiply this by every existing quirk in the models.
gedy 4y ago
I think the savvy media companies realize that we're at the cusp of ai generated media - movies and music included. If we have free/open models trained on the past 100 years of media, they may become obsolete and they will fight this to the death. Irony is the "NSFW" moral concerns, when the media companies put out such negative and filthy content as it is.
- jug 4y ago
  It’s interesting how we already are at a point where home users can in theory make a Star Wars fan film with Luke’s actual face and synthesized voice.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    As a Star Wars fan, having Luke's actual face and synthesized voice would be the least interesting thing about a fan film. What I would value much more is the writing, directing, editing, and acting... and you can't yet get very good quality of any of that through AI yet. Maybe someday, but not today.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  The way Disney is churning out rehashed content for its IP they're obsoleting themselves. When your human content is more predictable and stale than something generated by an AI you should hang your head in shame.
blackoil 4y ago
I am more hopeful. Unlike popcon/napster these models aren't directly impacting existing bottom line of any company/organization. Most of the models are trained on opensource / public datasets, so you won't find any company to sponsor the fight against these models. The cost of these models is an issue right now, but Mr. Moore has always handeled that well.
- samarthr1 4y ago
  Ah., but SD does compete with OpenAI's Dalle2 no? I am however not sure if that will cause too much trouble though.
- Jevon23 4y ago
  Unfortunately, you’re right. These models are beneficial to large corporations, and they do the most harm to the small individual artists who created the content that made them possible in the first place, so it’s unlikely there will be any serious legal challenges.
- capitalsigma 4y ago
  I don't think that Moore's law is what's driving down ML compute costs in particular, where there seems to be a lot of innovation going on in terms of hardware architecture and compilers (much of which is proprietary). Even just thinking about memory bandwidth, which historically has scaled much slower than compute: the $/second required to push 10+ TB of training data into some piece of hardware that can do useful work on it isn't going to fall by 100x in a decade.
  - elcomet 4y ago
    Moore's law is not driving anything, it's just an observation. The effet might have multiple causes. So Moore's law also applies here
    - aliqot 4y ago
      Moore's law is obsolete, we're thermodynamics boys now. How much power can you turn into CPU cycles rather than heat. It's the next frontier.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
This lines up with my observation of the sudden and complete absence of celebrity deep fakes (the adult rated or otherwise) from the internet. There is a legal machinery that works behind the scenes which we aren't always aware of.
- Huh1337 4y ago
  I think you're just not looking. It might've disappeared from Twitter and Facebook, but it's still on Reddit, 4Chan and many other sites.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    It is, but 4chan is hardly the mainstream internet, and there's a lot worse than celebrity deepfakes on it. On Reddit, it has been relegated to a few pariah subreddits. Earlier, you would have spotted some on the homepage.
    - Huh1337 4y ago
      Not sure what you mean by "mainstream internet", it's a normal page anyone can access by typing its address into the browser. Well known, too. And if you're looking for this kind of thing it's the first suggestion you're going to find. Sure, it's not on the most visited homepages of the world - but it hardly went away. Even on the most visited homepage it's just few clicks away.
Vetch 4y ago
What's the point of downloading it when it'd just stagnate? This isn't like regular software where people can easily put in hard work and sweat to improve it. LLMs have the unfortunate limitation of being both powerful and lending themselves to centralized control choke-points due to how resource intensive they are to train. Under this paradigm, I fear commercial entities will be able to easily navigate the legal landmines and continually improve while open efforts perpetually lag far behind. There are many vested interests who want this control for various reasons they justify as: protection from x-risk, keeping it out of the hands of abusers and bullies, economic advantage. Their reasons for want of control are either well intended but wrong-headed or profit-motivated and disingenuous. Rather than challenging the likes of GPT-3 and Copilot enabling freedom, I fear folks will be forced to send all their videos, pictures, text and code to the servers of Microsoft, Amazon and Google or lose access to advantages as LLMs continue to improve at a rapid clip.
- visarga 4y ago
  > LLMs have the unfortunate limitation of being both powerful and lending themselves to centralized control choke-points It was hard to accomplish, but you can finetune SD on your computer. They are working on instruction-tuning LLMs as well. In general ML models are not closed boxes inaccessible to us - they can be finetuned, reprompted, you can even average two versions to get a mix of two models. In the last 2 years lots of papers were written on finetuning and prompting, all of them geared towards low resource AI adaptation to new tasks.
  - dividedbyzero 4y ago
    But you can't selectively re-train them, can you? As in, don't use elements from this part of the training data anymore, but use elements from this body of work that wasn't part of the training data? If I understand correctly you'd still need a full re-training for that.
    - visarga 4y ago
      What you can do is - lexical filtering by applying a blacklist of artist names on the original prompt - perceptual filtering - drop all generated images that look too close to copyrighted images in your training set - re-captioning based filtering - use a model to generate captions for an image and apply filters on the captions; you can also filter by visual style - CLIP based filtering where you use embeddings to find nearest neighbours, and if they are copyrighted then you can drop the image - or train a copyright violation detection model that takes generated images and compares them to images from the original authors Copyright enforcement struggles are going to be interesting to watch in this decade. But I think it will slowly become irrelevant, because anything can be generate again slightly different until they finally pass the filters.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
>Popcorn time lost a similar battle. i was actively following torrentfreak at the time and there was genuine excitement with something incredible but that only lasted a week :-( why do you say they lost the battle? the original team threw in the towel within the week but there are people who have taken the fight https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/releases/ https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/releases... here, the latest release was on 04 Sep 2022 so it is very much in active development with a lot of people contributing https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/graphs/contributors https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/graphs/c... so while the original team might not be working on it, like a true free software, the code lives.
dividedbyzero 4y ago
I've followed this sort of thing rather loosely so far, any recommendations what other pre-trained models would be worth looking at?
ionwake 4y ago
> close the Stable doors after the horses Diffused Encapsulates it all well I like this statement, total pottery
speleding 4y ago
> those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material The blog post says they are worried about the ability to use the model to "use it for illegal purposes and hurting people". I think that they are referring to the ability to create all kinds of compromising pictures (porn) with celebrities, kids, etc. Am I misreading that? They don't mention copyright anywhere.
- paulcole 4y ago
  > Am I misreading that? They don't mention copyright anywhere. The conspiracy theorist would say that if you were doing something you shouldn’t, you wouldn’t mention it. Instead, you’d give a more palatable excuse to buy yourself some time while you figure out how to get away (legally) with the thing you shouldn’t be doing.
manholio 4y ago
> That somehow international legislation will converge on the strictest possible interpretation of intellectual property, and those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material. That's the only possible interpretation, really. AI models algorithmically remix input intellectual property en masse, without any significant amount of human creativity, the only thing copyright law protects. As such, the models themselves are wholly derived works, essentially a compressed and compact representation of the artistic features of the original works. Legally, a AI model is equivalent to a huge tar.gz of copyrighted thumbnails: very limited fair use applies, only in some countries, and only in certain use contexts that generally don't harm the original author or out-compete them in the market place - the polar opposite of what AI models are.
prepend 4y ago
I forked deepfake a few years ago because it seemed interesting. I didn’t have a spidy sense just thought it would be something interesting to look into. But I forked in GitHub rather than doing a proper clone so now it’s gone. It reminds me to follow the datahoarder maxim that if you don’t admin then servers, you don’t have the data. So now I clone stuff to a local drive.
williamcotton 4y ago
From my research the general consensus is that the processing of copyrighted material will be considered fair use. Here is a lengthy legal discussion: https://texaslawreview.org/fair-learning/ https://texaslawreview.org/fair-learning/ Here is a short quote from an IP lawyer: “In terms of the ingestion of publicly accessible code, Ochoa said, there may be software license violations but that's probably protected by fair use. While there hasn't been a lot of litigation about that, a number of scholars have taken that position and he said he's inclined to agree.” https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/19/github_copilot_copyright/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/19/github_copilot_copyri...
- renonce 4y ago
  It’s very probably fair use under current copyright laws. The things is that the game is changing very rapidly. Right now it’s suffering from criticism in terms of how it affects the society and allows people to generate unwanted images, and merely copyright laws may not be sufficient to protect them. And it has already caught the regulator’s attention so even the law could be rewritten around these models.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    At least in the United States there is the jurisprudence of stare decisis. Case law is the only place where the details of how copyright are applied to software are hashed out. I don’t see this changing in the foreseeable future.
    - notacoward 4y ago
      > Case law is the only place where the details of how copyright are applied to software are hashed out Incorrect. In the absence of new legislation case law is how these things get worked out, but new statutes could be passed and could void prior case law.
      - williamcotton 4y ago
        Well that's a given in a discussion around common law jurisprudence. I still think it is highly unlikely that this changes. This issue doesn't seem to be making or breaking the political careers of the members of legislative branch anytime soon. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/title17.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/title17/title17.pdf Let me expand on this a bit... if you read through the above text (feel free to search for the below terms) of the current laws around copyright you will notice that there is no discussion of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea–expression_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea–expression_distinction These legal doctrines are the result of the details as hashed out in case law. This is distinct from countries that use civil law jurisprudence. Common law jurisprudence relies heavily on case law.
liuliu 4y ago
Model can be retrained (with some money). But data is harder. I cannot backup LAION 5B unfortunately. If you can, please do! (About 200T)
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  A distributed backup might be possible. Get 200 interested people backing up 1 TB each and you have your 200 TB backup. With redundancy and error correction data added to the mix, you should be able to lose a certain percentage of participants and still have access to the full, error-free backup.
  - liuliu 4y ago
    Yeah, need to write the program and distributed in r/datahoarder This should be next on my list since my current project depends on SD model and having data backed up gives me confidence that I can get rid of all their stuff if needed.
    - MayeulC 4y ago
      Hmm, you can just create a torrent out of it. Either as a single file (impractical, but you can just avoid downloading it fully), or chunk it into multiple files. You don't even need to store it all at once on your computer: stream it and generate checksums on the fly. Then distribute the torrent, and seed sections at a time. It can also be distributed on IPFS. I've seen a lot of torrents being used for distributing neural network (mostly stable diffusion forks).
      - liuliu 4y ago
        Good point. Let me think through this. I have about 15T free space so this can be seeded separately in ~12 batches.
        MayeulC 4y ago
        You can also distribute different torrents, it's easier. Or multiple IPFS CIDs. I think you can have a "directory" (CID) that contains multiple CIDs, and only need the content hashes to build it. You can also publish multiple CIDs and ask people to seed random ones; that's how Libgen does it (and is similar to the multiple torrents concept). The same file can be used to seed both torrents and IPFS.
EGreg 4y ago
Where can we get Stable Diffusion downloaded?
stelonix 4y ago
Yesterday I was backing up and old failing HD. I looked at the models I downloaded since 2014 and since I was out of time, I decided to just delete them. But I deleted them with the same thought you just shared: those old models probably don't even exist anymore, they're probably gone. I'm just hoping that time you described isn't happening anytime soon.
adamsmith143 4y ago
>That somehow international legislation will converge on the strictest possible interpretation of intellectual property, and those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material. Just feels absurd to me because how is this different from any Human artist who you could equally say was "trained" on copyrighted material. >Get it now when there are trustworthy sources. Once these kinds of things go underground, it gets much harder to get a trustworthy version. People have already reverse engineered most text2image models and given enough hardware can train their own. There is no need for this hysterical take. As long as the internet exists you will be able to train these models.
didibus 4y ago
The UK and the EU have already made to law that text and data mining is excluded from copyright for non-commercial uses, and the UK has even done so for commercial use cases. Personally, I think commercial use cases should get license agreements from the authors for their training data, but I think non-commercial exemptions to advance the field of AI makes sense. Irregardless of what I think though, the UK has set an international precedent, and the EU is apparently discussing about possibly extending it to commercial use cases as well. So there's that.
corndoge 4y ago
I agree that it’s a good idea to download everything now and I agree that the legal powers that be will probably soon force it underground - but I’m less certain the driving reason will be copyright / IP. I think it will be reasons similar to what TA hints at. People are (somewhat understandably) upset with certain classes of output the model is capable of generating and a moral panic is likely to ensue that, historically, has won most cases it’s presented itself in.
datacruncher01 4y ago
I figure these tools fall in a similar category to web scraping which is legal. What you can’t do is copy the file. If you can demonstrate that you are modifying the source data then it’s a new work. Style is not protected by copyright as much as famous artists may want. Where copyright may be applicable is when the models reproduce original art without modification that a reasonable person wouldn’t know the difference.
LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
I think it'll be EU-style privacy regulations that make it illegal to train on the majority of data. Perhaps the requirement to be able to remove a user's impact from an already computed model if they file a right-to-be-forgotten. Something that would make any non-trivial model a legal nightmare.
metadat 4y ago
Is there a torrent available? This is an effective way to ensure the models and information remain available indefinitely.

Satam 4y ago

Wow, thank you. That's a very interesting take. You mention Popcorn time. I wonder if torrents in general could be a great example of how something like this plays out? Torrenting took the world by storm and had an amazing "product-market fit" for the early internet days. Of course, downloading copyrighted material was always illegal but that didn't stop many. Over time, legal but paid alternatives rose up: Spotify, iTunes, Netflix. These players found their place in the market by balancing the interest of copyright holders and the needs of users looking for cheap and easy access to entertainment. Just as Netflix acquired large content libraries, same here. With enough money, large training datasets could be acquired in a legally solid manner. It's interesting to think where this analogy might fail as well, and how the paths of these technologies could differ. For one, torrenting was mostly for entertainment, and thus impacted B2C first. On the other hand, language models are more so for media _creation_ and the B2B sphere.

machina_ex_deus 4y ago
They can and do fight dirty. They don't only use legal tactics, they use legal options to get the information off from trustworthy sources. Like torrents, you first have to resort to random websites who get randomly taken down as they acquire reputation. If a person takes the face and responsibility for something, he gets litigated into oblivion. So you get to the point where trustworthy and untrustworthy sources are indistinguishable . Now what they do is create untrustworthy sources. Like time for popcorn. Sow discord. Fork several times, create intentionally malwared versions of both the program and the website. Keep kicking off the trustworthy sources of search engines, while magically skipping takedown requests for the less trustworthy websites. Find ways to break old versions if possible, just to force them to keep moving. (they can make gradio randomly change APIs just to break the old trustworthy versions) All of this can happen.
- JohnnyNewhouse 4y ago
  Fight dirty, you say? Capital idea. Let's see, the principals of any company or trade group that try litigating model providers "into oblivion" can have some more legal fun when synthetic images of them diddling their kids find their way to law enforcement or local vigilante organisations. And for anyone too squeamish for that, there should be a way to use the tech to do a really good SWATing for suspected murder -- bit of fine-tuning on screenshots from ISIS and Mexican drug gang videos, etcetera. Before this gets flagged to oblivion, this is obvious. You just have to recognise that the "regulators" and industry insiders Emad is trying to "shield" you from are enemies and ask yourself, how do I hurt them?
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >All of this can happen. And reasonably technical people have zero issues, as it should be. Media piracy has been abundant my entire life. It's never slowed down or become inaccessable.
pmoriarty 4y ago
"Over time, legal but paid alternatives rose up: Spotify, iTunes, Netflix. These players found their place in the market by balancing the interest of copyright holders and the needs of users looking for cheap and easy access to entertainment." You didn't mention one of the largest (perhaps even the largest) distributor of copyright content (which happens to also be free, for now): YouTube. You can watch/listen to endless amounts of copyrighted content (and other types of content) on there completely for free, and to say it's tremendously popular would be an understatement. Google has made it work through ads. Perhaps something like that will happen with image-generating AI.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Notably Youtube contained rampant copyright infringement in the early years, but to be able to hold their market position gradually pivoted to a system that treats existing large copyright holders preferentially and clamps down on everyone else.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    It still holds rampant copyright infringement.

fbdab103 4y ago

Any particular repos/artifacts you suggest downloading?

lostmsu 4y ago
YALM 100B, and that giant codegen model from Salesforce https://huggingface.co/Salesforce https://huggingface.co/Salesforce

zakki 4y ago

can you point the good source to download? thanks.

Stagnant 4y ago
Hugging face is the original source for most of the latest models, including the latest Stable Diffusion v1.5[1] [1]: https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5
a1369209993 4y ago
Can't find a working link for 1.5, but for anyone who cares, I did turn up https://rentry.org/voldy https://rentry.org/voldy, which has a actually-working link for SD 1.4[0] (in addition to the huggingface paywall) as well as to a couple other compatible models including NovelAI. 0: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3a4a612d75ed088ea542acac52f9f45987488d1c&dn=sd-v1-4.ckpt&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.opentrackr.org%3a1337
- osanseviero 4y ago
  Hugging Face has no paywall
  - emikulic 4y ago
    You have to create an account and agree to some stuff and be logged in but you're correct that you don't have to pay.
    - a1369209993 4y ago
      > You have to create an account and agree to some stuff and be logged in So a paywall. I agree it's a annoyingly misleading term for the concept and would be happy to hear better alternatives[0], but I haven't found one yet. 0: like eg "passphrase" instead of "password" or "assuming the conclusion" instead of "begging the question" for their respective concepts

green_on_black 4y ago

Here's a (not-recommended but amusing) nuclear option: Tit-for-tat. Regulators and artists don't want this? Okay, include in all open source software licenses that regulators and artists are now barred from using them without payment.

beojan 4y ago
A lot of open source software authors don't want this either because it can circumvent copyleft and attribution requirements. Also, discriminating like you suggest would make those licenses closed source by definition.
- green_on_black 4y ago
  I'm glad you're responding with real issues, though let me reiterate that my comment was more to amuse and vent. Long live clopen source!
- amelius 4y ago
  > Also, discriminating like you suggest would make those licenses closed source by definition. Definitions are not what matters in the end. Why doesn't the viral and restrictive element of GNU's GPL license make the license "non-open"?
  - beojan 4y ago
    Definitions are what matter, they're the reason you can use words and I can understand what you mean by them. "Open source" has a definition (https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd) and the GPL meets it, because it doesn't prevent derived worries from being distributed under the same license.
- wnkrshm 4y ago
  Interestingly it's the same with attribution requirements for art, but since it's not written words, nobody can claim: "this part is exactly my GPL code". But with art it's "this is exactly how I do texture on metal", "this is exactly how I paint steampunk greeble", "this is how I do clouds" etc.

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

Companies have a similar problem now with AI than what the music labels had with Napster and MP3s in the 90's. Music labels tried very hard to legislate the problem away but it failed. I remember Metallica's Lars Ulrich working hard to fight it. They finally embraced the change. If it can't be done in the U.S., it will be done in some other country. That country will have the competitive advantage. We'll go thru the same with AI but ultimately it won't be stopped. As long as there's no world wide coordination limiting its impact, AI will continue its course.

azinman2 4y ago
How did he embrace the change? I just remember years of lawsuits and whatnot.
- andirk 4y ago
  He sued his fans and no he has no fans?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- learn-forever 4y ago
  People are now happily listening to Metallica on streaming services
squokko 4y ago
They did legislate the problem away. Sure, Spotify and YouTube play a part in the reduced music piracy today. But it also helps that all of the music piracy sites have been killed, and the only ones left are shady enough that you fear malware if you go there.
- Garlef 4y ago
  It's streaming that killed piracy. And even piracy was only partially to avoid paying money: It was a huge UX win over CDs. The iPod would not have had the impact it had without piracy.

pabs3 4y ago

Models that are trained on data under open source licenses (such as Creative Commons) would likely be much safer from copyright claims. I like to use the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning Policy to evaluate the openness of ML work. https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy

wongarsu 4y ago
Unless they carry with them a library of attributions to every source image, that safety comes mostly from anticipating that authors of CC-licensed works won't be too upset about people using them.

tarunmuvvala 4y ago

Stability AI is formed with that vision to keep is open-source and accessible to the masses. It's very rare that we might see it becoming a closed source

gedy 4y ago
But it might eventually be neutered with filtering out "problematic" content from the models. Maybe that's NSFW now, but then could easily have busybodies start pressing for "bias" and other topics to be removed.
- neonsunset 4y ago
  Someone here put it very well to watch out how the masses would try to censor AI-produced content into oblivion in their futile pursuit of trying to shoot the messenger.

seydor 4y ago

what if the models are used to generate a new training set ?

visarga 4y ago
About 150m images have been generated with SD so far. That's already a new large scale training set. Generate and curate before retraining to create a virtuous cycle.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  This looks more like polluting the training set to me.
fredoliveira 4y ago
> That somehow international legislation will converge on the strictest possible interpretation of intellectual property, and those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material. Doesn't this ultimately result in local maxima? All the biases get reinforced and all the novelty (things the system hasn't seen/produced yet) goes away. A tiny example: Dall-E (and SD) both struggled with eye positioning, for example. Wouldn't training a model on their output then reinforce that particular bias of poorly positioning eyes? Now multiply this by every existing quirk in the models.

gedy 4y ago

I think the savvy media companies realize that we're at the cusp of ai generated media - movies and music included. If we have free/open models trained on the past 100 years of media, they may become obsolete and they will fight this to the death. Irony is the "NSFW" moral concerns, when the media companies put out such negative and filthy content as it is.

jug 4y ago
It’s interesting how we already are at a point where home users can in theory make a Star Wars fan film with Luke’s actual face and synthesized voice.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  As a Star Wars fan, having Luke's actual face and synthesized voice would be the least interesting thing about a fan film. What I would value much more is the writing, directing, editing, and acting... and you can't yet get very good quality of any of that through AI yet. Maybe someday, but not today.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
The way Disney is churning out rehashed content for its IP they're obsoleting themselves. When your human content is more predictable and stale than something generated by an AI you should hang your head in shame.

blackoil 4y ago

I am more hopeful. Unlike popcon/napster these models aren't directly impacting existing bottom line of any company/organization. Most of the models are trained on opensource / public datasets, so you won't find any company to sponsor the fight against these models. The cost of these models is an issue right now, but Mr. Moore has always handeled that well.

samarthr1 4y ago
Ah., but SD does compete with OpenAI's Dalle2 no? I am however not sure if that will cause too much trouble though.
Jevon23 4y ago
Unfortunately, you’re right. These models are beneficial to large corporations, and they do the most harm to the small individual artists who created the content that made them possible in the first place, so it’s unlikely there will be any serious legal challenges.
capitalsigma 4y ago
I don't think that Moore's law is what's driving down ML compute costs in particular, where there seems to be a lot of innovation going on in terms of hardware architecture and compilers (much of which is proprietary). Even just thinking about memory bandwidth, which historically has scaled much slower than compute: the $/second required to push 10+ TB of training data into some piece of hardware that can do useful work on it isn't going to fall by 100x in a decade.
- elcomet 4y ago
  Moore's law is not driving anything, it's just an observation. The effet might have multiple causes. So Moore's law also applies here
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Moore's law is obsolete, we're thermodynamics boys now. How much power can you turn into CPU cycles rather than heat. It's the next frontier.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

This lines up with my observation of the sudden and complete absence of celebrity deep fakes (the adult rated or otherwise) from the internet. There is a legal machinery that works behind the scenes which we aren't always aware of.

Huh1337 4y ago
I think you're just not looking. It might've disappeared from Twitter and Facebook, but it's still on Reddit, 4Chan and many other sites.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  It is, but 4chan is hardly the mainstream internet, and there's a lot worse than celebrity deepfakes on it. On Reddit, it has been relegated to a few pariah subreddits. Earlier, you would have spotted some on the homepage.
  - Huh1337 4y ago
    Not sure what you mean by "mainstream internet", it's a normal page anyone can access by typing its address into the browser. Well known, too. And if you're looking for this kind of thing it's the first suggestion you're going to find. Sure, it's not on the most visited homepages of the world - but it hardly went away. Even on the most visited homepage it's just few clicks away.

Vetch 4y ago

What's the point of downloading it when it'd just stagnate? This isn't like regular software where people can easily put in hard work and sweat to improve it. LLMs have the unfortunate limitation of being both powerful and lending themselves to centralized control choke-points due to how resource intensive they are to train. Under this paradigm, I fear commercial entities will be able to easily navigate the legal landmines and continually improve while open efforts perpetually lag far behind. There are many vested interests who want this control for various reasons they justify as: protection from x-risk, keeping it out of the hands of abusers and bullies, economic advantage. Their reasons for want of control are either well intended but wrong-headed or profit-motivated and disingenuous. Rather than challenging the likes of GPT-3 and Copilot enabling freedom, I fear folks will be forced to send all their videos, pictures, text and code to the servers of Microsoft, Amazon and Google or lose access to advantages as LLMs continue to improve at a rapid clip.

visarga 4y ago
> LLMs have the unfortunate limitation of being both powerful and lending themselves to centralized control choke-points It was hard to accomplish, but you can finetune SD on your computer. They are working on instruction-tuning LLMs as well. In general ML models are not closed boxes inaccessible to us - they can be finetuned, reprompted, you can even average two versions to get a mix of two models. In the last 2 years lots of papers were written on finetuning and prompting, all of them geared towards low resource AI adaptation to new tasks.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  But you can't selectively re-train them, can you? As in, don't use elements from this part of the training data anymore, but use elements from this body of work that wasn't part of the training data? If I understand correctly you'd still need a full re-training for that.
  - visarga 4y ago
    What you can do is - lexical filtering by applying a blacklist of artist names on the original prompt - perceptual filtering - drop all generated images that look too close to copyrighted images in your training set - re-captioning based filtering - use a model to generate captions for an image and apply filters on the captions; you can also filter by visual style - CLIP based filtering where you use embeddings to find nearest neighbours, and if they are copyrighted then you can drop the image - or train a copyright violation detection model that takes generated images and compares them to images from the original authors Copyright enforcement struggles are going to be interesting to watch in this decade. But I think it will slowly become irrelevant, because anything can be generate again slightly different until they finally pass the filters.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

>Popcorn time lost a similar battle. i was actively following torrentfreak at the time and there was genuine excitement with something incredible but that only lasted a week :-( why do you say they lost the battle? the original team threw in the towel within the week but there are people who have taken the fight https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/releases/ https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/releases... here, the latest release was on 04 Sep 2022 so it is very much in active development with a lot of people contributing https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/graphs/contributors https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/graphs/c... so while the original team might not be working on it, like a true free software, the code lives.

dividedbyzero 4y ago

I've followed this sort of thing rather loosely so far, any recommendations what other pre-trained models would be worth looking at?

ionwake 4y ago

> close the Stable doors after the horses Diffused Encapsulates it all well I like this statement, total pottery

speleding 4y ago

> those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material The blog post says they are worried about the ability to use the model to "use it for illegal purposes and hurting people". I think that they are referring to the ability to create all kinds of compromising pictures (porn) with celebrities, kids, etc. Am I misreading that? They don't mention copyright anywhere.

paulcole 4y ago
> Am I misreading that? They don't mention copyright anywhere. The conspiracy theorist would say that if you were doing something you shouldn’t, you wouldn’t mention it. Instead, you’d give a more palatable excuse to buy yourself some time while you figure out how to get away (legally) with the thing you shouldn’t be doing.

manholio 4y ago

> That somehow international legislation will converge on the strictest possible interpretation of intellectual property, and those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material. That's the only possible interpretation, really. AI models algorithmically remix input intellectual property en masse, without any significant amount of human creativity, the only thing copyright law protects. As such, the models themselves are wholly derived works, essentially a compressed and compact representation of the artistic features of the original works. Legally, a AI model is equivalent to a huge tar.gz of copyrighted thumbnails: very limited fair use applies, only in some countries, and only in certain use contexts that generally don't harm the original author or out-compete them in the market place - the polar opposite of what AI models are.

prepend 4y ago

I forked deepfake a few years ago because it seemed interesting. I didn’t have a spidy sense just thought it would be something interesting to look into. But I forked in GitHub rather than doing a proper clone so now it’s gone. It reminds me to follow the datahoarder maxim that if you don’t admin then servers, you don’t have the data. So now I clone stuff to a local drive.

williamcotton 4y ago

From my research the general consensus is that the processing of copyrighted material will be considered fair use. Here is a lengthy legal discussion: https://texaslawreview.org/fair-learning/ https://texaslawreview.org/fair-learning/ Here is a short quote from an IP lawyer: “In terms of the ingestion of publicly accessible code, Ochoa said, there may be software license violations but that's probably protected by fair use. While there hasn't been a lot of litigation about that, a number of scholars have taken that position and he said he's inclined to agree.” https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/19/github_copilot_copyright/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/19/github_copilot_copyri...

renonce 4y ago
It’s very probably fair use under current copyright laws. The things is that the game is changing very rapidly. Right now it’s suffering from criticism in terms of how it affects the society and allows people to generate unwanted images, and merely copyright laws may not be sufficient to protect them. And it has already caught the regulator’s attention so even the law could be rewritten around these models.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  At least in the United States there is the jurisprudence of stare decisis. Case law is the only place where the details of how copyright are applied to software are hashed out. I don’t see this changing in the foreseeable future.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    > Case law is the only place where the details of how copyright are applied to software are hashed out Incorrect. In the absence of new legislation case law is how these things get worked out, but new statutes could be passed and could void prior case law.
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      Well that's a given in a discussion around common law jurisprudence. I still think it is highly unlikely that this changes. This issue doesn't seem to be making or breaking the political careers of the members of legislative branch anytime soon. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/title17.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/title17/title17.pdf Let me expand on this a bit... if you read through the above text (feel free to search for the below terms) of the current laws around copyright you will notice that there is no discussion of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea–expression_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea–expression_distinction These legal doctrines are the result of the details as hashed out in case law. This is distinct from countries that use civil law jurisprudence. Common law jurisprudence relies heavily on case law.

liuliu 4y ago

Model can be retrained (with some money). But data is harder. I cannot backup LAION 5B unfortunately. If you can, please do! (About 200T)

pmoriarty 4y ago
A distributed backup might be possible. Get 200 interested people backing up 1 TB each and you have your 200 TB backup. With redundancy and error correction data added to the mix, you should be able to lose a certain percentage of participants and still have access to the full, error-free backup.
- liuliu 4y ago
  Yeah, need to write the program and distributed in r/datahoarder This should be next on my list since my current project depends on SD model and having data backed up gives me confidence that I can get rid of all their stuff if needed.
  - MayeulC 4y ago
    Hmm, you can just create a torrent out of it. Either as a single file (impractical, but you can just avoid downloading it fully), or chunk it into multiple files. You don't even need to store it all at once on your computer: stream it and generate checksums on the fly. Then distribute the torrent, and seed sections at a time. It can also be distributed on IPFS. I've seen a lot of torrents being used for distributing neural network (mostly stable diffusion forks).
    - liuliu 4y ago
      Good point. Let me think through this. I have about 15T free space so this can be seeded separately in ~12 batches.
      - MayeulC 4y ago
        You can also distribute different torrents, it's easier. Or multiple IPFS CIDs. I think you can have a "directory" (CID) that contains multiple CIDs, and only need the content hashes to build it. You can also publish multiple CIDs and ask people to seed random ones; that's how Libgen does it (and is similar to the multiple torrents concept). The same file can be used to seed both torrents and IPFS.

EGreg 4y ago

Where can we get Stable Diffusion downloaded?

stelonix 4y ago

Yesterday I was backing up and old failing HD. I looked at the models I downloaded since 2014 and since I was out of time, I decided to just delete them. But I deleted them with the same thought you just shared: those old models probably don't even exist anymore, they're probably gone. I'm just hoping that time you described isn't happening anytime soon.

adamsmith143 4y ago

>That somehow international legislation will converge on the strictest possible interpretation of intellectual property, and those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material. Just feels absurd to me because how is this different from any Human artist who you could equally say was "trained" on copyrighted material. >Get it now when there are trustworthy sources. Once these kinds of things go underground, it gets much harder to get a trustworthy version. People have already reverse engineered most text2image models and given enough hardware can train their own. There is no need for this hysterical take. As long as the internet exists you will be able to train these models.

didibus 4y ago

The UK and the EU have already made to law that text and data mining is excluded from copyright for non-commercial uses, and the UK has even done so for commercial use cases. Personally, I think commercial use cases should get license agreements from the authors for their training data, but I think non-commercial exemptions to advance the field of AI makes sense. Irregardless of what I think though, the UK has set an international precedent, and the EU is apparently discussing about possibly extending it to commercial use cases as well. So there's that.

corndoge 4y ago

I agree that it’s a good idea to download everything now and I agree that the legal powers that be will probably soon force it underground - but I’m less certain the driving reason will be copyright / IP. I think it will be reasons similar to what TA hints at. People are (somewhat understandably) upset with certain classes of output the model is capable of generating and a moral panic is likely to ensue that, historically, has won most cases it’s presented itself in.

datacruncher01 4y ago

I figure these tools fall in a similar category to web scraping which is legal. What you can’t do is copy the file. If you can demonstrate that you are modifying the source data then it’s a new work. Style is not protected by copyright as much as famous artists may want. Where copyright may be applicable is when the models reproduce original art without modification that a reasonable person wouldn’t know the difference.

LawTalkingGuy 4y ago

I think it'll be EU-style privacy regulations that make it illegal to train on the majority of data. Perhaps the requirement to be able to remove a user's impact from an already computed model if they file a right-to-be-forgotten. Something that would make any non-trivial model a legal nightmare.

metadat 4y ago

Is there a torrent available? This is an effective way to ensure the models and information remain available indefinitely.