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Ask HN: Is Anyone Else Tired of the Self Enforced Limits on AI Tech?

• gitfan86 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
• 627467 4y ago
  Well yeah. But: are we sure the motivation is a moral one? Or is it a financial one? Not passing judgement, but we live in times where it is very easy to handwave moral/ethic/sustainability arguments to fog up the true reasons for certain decisions
• orangesite 4y ago
  Historically, tech folk have always pursued the commercialization of technological innovation with net-zero analysis of any negative consequences, mea maxima culpa. That we have now run into a technology which makes many of _us_ uncomfortable should give you pause for thought and reflection.
  • jquery 4y ago
    Yeah, I’m actually a little impressed to see my industry that traditionally has run roughshod over humanity, damn the consequences style, is showing a tiny bit of restraint. Nothing like what we see in medicine or law or anything, but something. I figured we’d get reigned in like banks were before doing any self policing at all (after nearly destroying society of course).
    • bumby 4y ago
      IMO is aligns with a more professional industry approach in general. Law, medicine, engineering (in the capital E sense) all have ethical requirements and bodies that govern individuals. I think it’s natural for an industry like CS that has typically been like the Wild West to push back against regulation, but in the end, it’s probably for the better (at least with safety critical applications).
  • vintermann 4y ago
    We do pause, we do reflect. And our conclusion is that it's "us" who have changed, not the impact of technology. So you can make pictures and 3d models from text descriptions. So you can get a voice to say something. But if you were determined to do bad things, you already could. It would be easy enough to hire an actor who sounds like Obama and make him say something outrageous. It would be easy enough to use Photoshop to make disgusting images. Are you sure it's the capabilities you fear, and not the people who now for the first time will get access to them? Are you sure "we", the wealthy, the technologically and educationally resourceful, the powerful, are so much better custodians?
    • afarrell 4y ago
      If something is dangerous, that does not justify making it worse.
    • Bakary 4y ago
      It's not about class-based custodianship but rather the simple fact that the number of attempts like these will multiply like wildfire. You won't need to be determined, you'll just need five minutes with the software before heading to work.
    • ajmurmann 4y ago
      I have no string opinion on this very complex topic, but want to add that this is an area where the quote "sometimes quantity had a quality in its own" applies. Brennan's flooding the zone with shit propaganda methodology to me is One of the biggest challenges to democracy functioning. We might be able to debunk a handful of fake videos on the public discourse. What would happen if they're are suddenly thousands? Maybe we'd fight better ways to establish truth and a shared reality. Maybe democracy would utterly collapse. Ultimately, I don't think we'll able to keep the cat in the bag though. If nothing else, nation actors like Russia or China will get their hands on it and crank the propaganda machine with it. We might be better prepared if we just shorten the learning process and give everyone access. That might open some hope that we'll be able to adapt. It's a really scary dice roll though.
      • 4y ago
  • akiselev 4y ago
    >* That we have now run into a technology which makes many of _us_ uncomfortable should give you pause for thought and reflection.* You mean like the online advertising industry? That shit has been making many of us uncomfortable since the early 2000s. Now that the technology is sufficiently decentralized the morality police comes along.
    • TigeriusKirk 4y ago
      It feels like we're going to "safety" ourselves into an even more extreme oligarchy and congratulate ourselves for being so wise to do so.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    They aren't uncomfortable. They just aren't sure how to maintain control over the technology and monopolize it. Which is why they are so cagey about releasing anything.
• andybak 4y ago
  I'm simultaneously irritated by the restrictions and concerned for the future. I am a contradiction.
• mckirk 4y ago
  I really, really hope that there aren't any people who think the way you've outlined. Technology has empowered small groups or even single individuals to create things that have the potential to change the course of civilization, so I for sure hope those individuals think twice about the potential consequences of their actions. How would you feel about people releasing a $100 'build your own Covid-variant' kit?
  • brigandish 4y ago
    > How would you feel about people releasing a $100 'build your own Covid-variant' kit? Not very good but: a) the people who currently have this tech are not what I'd call trustworthy so why should I leave dangerous tech only in the hands of dangerous people? b) it would probably kickstart a "build your own vaccine kit" industry
    • Madmallard 4y ago
      Human life is quite fragile
    • afarrell 4y ago
      What questions would you ask to decide if someone is a trustworthy steward of that technology?
      • brigandish 4y ago
        Did you fund gain of research function at the labs in Wuhan? Do you know what they found? Were you aware of the low level of biosecurity protocols on the site? Things like that ;-)
        • alexvoda 4y ago
          These would not answer whether someone behaves responsibly with dangerous research. It answers whether someone had any connection to Wuhan. You can find plenty of people who would answer all "no"-s and would be far more destructive if they had access. Would you also claim that no one who worked at Cernobyl was trustworthy? This is just guilt by association.
• greenthrow 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • vt85 4y ago
    [dead]
  • joenot443 4y ago
    The World Wide Web, defi, and NoSQL are just a couple random examples of new technologies which we were pitched as having the potential to change software development forever. Can you remember any other time in history a new programming technology was treated with the same apprehension and kid gloves we’re currently seeing with image diffusion? If not, I actually think you’re the one being childish and the OP’s actually made a perfectly reasonable observation.
    • II2II 4y ago
      Encryption is the first one that comes to mind, particularly since it ended up affecting consumers once the internet became commercialized. Anything remotely military related also fits into that basket, though few people would have run into the self-enforced hesitancy to release code since (outside of the military) it would affect very few people outside of academia. That said, the reality is that we live in a time that is very self-aware of the unintended consequences of technology as well as a time where we have communications technologies that propagate that awareness at a speed and breadth that were difficult to conceive of thirty years ago. This ranges from our impact on the environment to criminal activities online. I don't think that it is unusual for people to be questioning the unintended consequences of their work.
    • greenthrow 4y ago
      The WWW was not viewed as revolutionary when it first came out. Remember, it was all text at first and hyperlinked documents were already a thing. Gopher existed already. The revolution that happened with the web wasn't one little thing, it was the culmination of a lot of small things. Home dial up internet access becoming available. Modem speeds picking up. The addition of images to the web by Mosaic. JPEG compression making images small enough to download "quickly" over the dial up connections, etc. NoSQL wasn't a new technology. It was rebranding of old technology and a rejection of what people felt were overly complicated and bloated solutions for certain problem spaces. Defi is a bad joke. As another reply already mentioned, certain forms of encryption were kept from the public and restricted. I think right now it is likely the current state of the art of quantum computing is being kept under wraps for similar reasons. Lots of weapons related technology is kept restricted for good reasons. You and the OP have a distorted ideologically based view of history that never happened.
• thrillgore 4y ago
  Our profession has long been ignorant to the moral ramifications of what it can do, so for once, pumping the brakes seems like the right approach.
  • stackedinserter 4y ago
    Just a friendly reminder that in "our profession" we have different people with different definitions of what's "moral" what what's not.
• svnt 4y ago
  The hesitancy came from a good place. In some senses this is a very disruptive technology stack. But when morality suddenly is reinforced in an area where the same people espousing it are trying to rapidly earn billions of dollars, I am skeptical. Transformers are a form of translation and information compression, ultimately. The morality seems to me at this point a convenient smokescreen to hide the fact that these companies are not actually open source, that they are not there for the public benefit, and that they are not very different to venture-backed businesses that have come before. What is the risk of open-sourcing the product? Very few individuals could assemble a dataset or train a full competitive model on their own hardware. So not really a competitive risk there. But every big corp could. The morality angle protects the startups from the big six. SD is a product demo. I view it the same way at the highest level as an alpha version of Google translate.
  • hprotagonist 4y ago
    > The morality seems to me at this point a convenient smokescreen to hide the fact that these companies are not actually open source, that they are not there for the public benefit, and that they are not very different to venture-backed businesses that have come before. And that they’re buggy and hard to fix and generally more limited than the buzz would have you believe. public high minded talk morality also cynically keeps the money coming in :)
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    There is legitimate regulatory risk with ai generative models. Really all it takes is the media picking up one bizarre story about child revenge porn generated with these models for them to be completely banned. And a ban wouldn’t mean people stop using them, just that researchers stop getting paid for making them.
    • svnt 4y ago
      Definitely. Framing it as morality when it is business risk is disingenuous though.
      • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• cypress66 4y ago
  Yes because it's mostly used as an excuse and they don't care about such moral issues. And the real reason behind locking it down is either it benefits their business model, or they don't want to receive bad publicity from "woke" or "pruritan" people, or simply media trying to generate controversies because it generates clicks.
• booleandilemma 4y ago
  I don't think it's coming from a place of morality at all. That's just a cover. If anything, society cares less about morality than ever before. It's about competition and not giving up the secret sauce. Before companies like Amazon became huge, people didn't quite know just how much value was to be found in software. Now everyone knows it, and the space has become ultra competitive.
• dougmwne 4y ago
  I agree tht I find it all pretty silly. You know what else can produce horrifying and immoral images? Pencil and paper. I suspect that quite a lot of this caution is driven by Google and other large companies which want to slow everyone else down so they can win the new market on this tech. The remaining part of the caution appears to come from our neo-puritan era where there is a whole lot of pearl clutching over everything. Newsflash, humans are violent brutes, always have been.
  • jmfldn 4y ago
    The key difference with pencil and paper being that I can't produce photoreal deep fakes at the speed of processing. That's not a valid comparison. You might be right in the second paragraph about the motivations for slowing this down. There clearly are reasons to be cautious here though, even if this isn't the real reason for the current caution.
    • betwixthewires 4y ago
      Replace pencil and paper with a camera then if it makes you happy, although I don't think the quality of the images make a single bit of difference. Why should only the few have access to such a technology? Because some people will use it for naughty things? And that's what we are talking about here, about whether a minority should have permissioned access to a new technology, and particularly one that cannot directly actually cause physical harm. I can glean motivations surrounding all this from that observation alone.
      • NateEag 4y ago
        The digital camera is still several orders of magnitude slower and more expensive to operate than DALL-E or SD. Side note: if you're a materialist, you should believe that psychological harm is physical harm. It's obvious that being able to publish images of someone doing things they themselves find reprehensible could cause lots of trauma.
        • 4y ago
• rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  Eventually, as Frank Herbert predicted, we may come to the conclusion that the societal costs of AI in general are too high and it will be outlawed entirely.
• vintermann 4y ago
  There are many who are unhappy about OpenAI and Google's paternalism. Some reseachers say it openly, like Yannic Kilcher. Others were a bit more discreet about it, but I wasn't exactly surprised hardmaru left Google Brain for Stability to put it like that. The way social pressure is trending, I'm assuming everyone who doesn't loudly defend AI paternalism, shares your concern to some degree.
  • afarrell 4y ago
    Paternalism is me telling you what to do with your work. Those who are silent are largely humble or uncertain.
• celdon25 4y ago
  Unless the government criminalizes AI “misuse”, these restrictions are only going to be a temporary measure until the other shoe drops and FOSS equivalents catch up. I’m more concerned with the idea that mainstream AI research is heading in the direction of adding more processing power in an attempt to reach “human-level” AGI. That would amount to brute forcing the problem, creating intelligent machines that we have little control over. We should absolutely be pursuing and supporting alternative projects, such as OpenCog or anything else that challenges the status quo. Do it for whatever reason you feel like, but we need those alternatives if we want to avoid the brute forcing threat.
• vsareto 4y ago
  TBH if you trained with lots of data you’re not supposed to use (no consent), you probably should be forced to release things. You shouldn’t get the agency to withhold work if you didn’t respect others’ choices about not contributing to AI. However generally it feels right to let the authors decide who has access to their work. If you have a different view, go do the work yourself.
  • tchaffee 4y ago
    > if you trained with lots of data you’re not supposed to use (no consent), you probably should be forced to release things That doesn't sound right at all. If you've used my work with no consent, it would seem that shutting you down would be the next legal and ethical step.
• newaccount2021 4y ago
• WhatsName 4y ago
  Let's be realistic, just like building codes, medical procedures and car manufacturing sooner or later we will also be subject to regulations. The times where hacking culture and tech was left unbothered are over. Twenty years ago we were free to do whatever we want, because it didn't matter. Nowadays everyone uses tech as much as they use stairs. You can't build stairs without railings though. Keeping the window for abuse small is beneficial to the whole industry. Otherwise bad press will put pressure on politicians to "do something about it" resulting in faster and more excessive regulations.
  • zarzavat 4y ago
    Buildings don’t cross borders. Code is information, and information wants to, and will be free. Short of a North Korea like setup, regulations can only slow down the spread of information around the world.
    • ouid 4y ago
      slow might be nice
    • freedom2099 4y ago
      Informations is just that… has no will nor wants
      • 9dev 4y ago
        Ah, come on. That’s the exact same argument as „guns don’t kill people, humans do“ - factually correct, but misses the entire point far and wide.
        • colejohnson66 4y ago
          Not really. Guns serve one purpose, really: shooting at things, while possibly killing it (ignoring gun ranges). It’s why they were created in the first place. That’s why the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument is bogus. “Information,” OTOH, doesn’t serve any particular purpose. On its own, information is just bits; it’s how those bits are used that matters. Those bits can be arranged to say “Hello, world”, but they can also be arranged to make the Stuxnet virus.
• togaen 4y ago
  You sound like a spoiled child. Don’t complain that people aren’t giving you free and complete access to their work. They made it, they decide how it gets released. If you think it should be done differently, then you do it.
  • dang 4y ago
    Attacking others is not ok here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? You've been breaking them more than once lately, unfortunately.
• the8472 4y ago
  Paperclip maximizers want to be free.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  Morality police usually enforce their beliefs on others - here the creators/owners of the technology are choosing how to release their work. OpenAI have a stated mission to "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity" and the restrictions are presumably to stop people doing things that aren't. Most of their restrictions seem to be inline with their mission: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6338764-are-there-any-restrictions-to-how-i-can-use-dall-e-2-is-there-a-content-policy https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6338764-are-there-any-re...
• londons_explore 4y ago
  I think everyone who works in or around AI has read The Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer [1]. Trying to control what they have built is their attempt to avoid falling into this trap. Not sure it'll work tho. [1]: https://hackernoon.com/the-parable-of-the-paperclip-maximizer-3ed4cccc669a https://hackernoon.com/the-parable-of-the-paperclip-maximize...
  • dementiapatent 4y ago
    But stable diffusion isn't an automated system maximizing its own power and drowning the world in paperclips in an out-of-control feedback loop. It's just me generating cool pictures on my GPU.
    • londons_explore 4y ago
      No? Training it to produce as 'realistic as possible' pictures could lead to it producing outputs which encourage humans to train it more and more, with more and more data, to eventually produce really good pictures. Before long, everyone on earth is working in a GPU factory... I don't think that'll happen with stable diffusion... but I do think that if AI is an existential threat to the world, the point of no return will be something apparently mundane like that...
      • henearkr 4y ago
        Hijacking our brains' reward system through visual hypersignals, just an exploit of our existing "visual addictions".
    • tchaffee 4y ago
      If you release the model then it's easily automated, isn't it?
      • dementiapatent 4y ago
        What is easily automated? Generating JPEGs until I receive an error that there is no more space on my hard drive? This would leave no bad effect on the world.
• tchaffee 4y ago
  Would you apply the same thinking to nuclear bombs?
• romeros 4y ago
  The current trend in tech is Twitter/Google style virtue signalling + activism style software development. I remember reading about an incident that happened couple of years back. A new grad SWE at FAANG wanted his colleague to espouse a particular political trend. His colleague just wanted nothing to do with it and just focus on doing his work and get the pay-check. tldr; that SWE got fired for publicly trying to call out his coworker on this issue. Morality and political correctness is baked into the process now.
• H8crilA 4y ago
  It's mostly about being able to profit from these models. Some investors sank quite a bit of money in salaries and compute equipment manufacture/purchase/rental.
• afarrell 4y ago
  It is wise and responsible for people to exercise caution for the impact of their work. When someone is impatient with you acting responsibility, you need not join them in their folly.
• freedom2099 4y ago
  The fact that it is their work kinda give them the right to decide how they want it to be used!
  • gs17 4y ago
    OP didn't say they don't have the right to lock it down. If I complain that you painted your car an ugly color, that isn't a claim that no one should be allowed to have their owned cars repainted (or, more accurately, if the paint shop refuses to paint my car an ugly color, complaining about it isn't necesssarily demanding their right to do so revoked).
• esharte 4y ago
  I had an ethics module in my Engineering degree. I'm guessing you didn't.
• paulcole 4y ago
  > It makes me wonder when tech folks suddenly decided to become the morality police Since the beginning of human history. If you think “tech folks” are some kind of libertarian monoculture then you’re deluding yourself.
  • jhfgjgjhfg 4y ago
• OhNoNotAgain_99 4y ago
• mhb 4y ago
  Are you objecting to avoiding potential deep fakes, paper clip maximizers or the appearance of nipples or penises?
  • boppo1 4y ago
    >deep fakes >nipples or penises This is a small but significant part of why I scoff when people claim AI has or will overtake artists. "Oh no! Not nudity and sex!" Artists have no such limitation in their tools.
• radarsat1 4y ago
  > It makes me wonder when tech folks suddenly decided to become the morality police Is it about "morality policing", or is it about avoiding bad PR? I find it fascinating how certain people want to ignore the social pressure that companies are under to avoid having their products be misused. Do you really think Google or whoever really wants the PR disaster of people releasing computer generated dick pics with their software? (Or whatever nonsense people will get up to.. I'm choosing a relatively tame example obviously.) They learned a thing or two from the public teaching Microsoft's chat bot how to swear and be a Nazi. I for one am not surprised and don't blame the companies in this iteration for being more than a little extra careful how the public gets to use their products and demos. I'm sure they have zero problem with whatever people do with their open source re-implementations. It's not about morality -- stopping people from doing certain things. It's about PR -- stopping people from doing certain things with their product. Because who needs the ethical and legal disaster just waiting around the corner of automatic celebrity and political deep fakes, etc. I just find it weird that people (like OP) pretend not to understand this, as it seems rather obvious and unsurprising to me.
  • neonsunset 4y ago
    The fact that a company would consider it a PR disaster for its technology to generate dick picks at industrial scale IS the issue. It's not a PR disaster and if it is, then it means a company had incorrect brand strategy from the get go. It's very ironic that the steps taken for the sake of "diversity", "tolerance" and "inclusiveness" ended up in the opposite. Perhaps it is time to stop listening to rainbow flag accounts on twitter and actually consider the desired outcomes?
    • pjc50 4y ago
      It's not rainbow flag twitter that will condemn you for the dick pics but conservative twitter.
• permo-w 4y ago
  it’s dressed up as a moral issue, but in reality they’re scared they’ll get sued or shat all over in the press, leading to lost profits. it’s the same for almost any business. 9 times out of 10 a business will act “immorally” if they don’t think it will affect their bottom line. openAI think letting you do whatever you like with dall-e will affect their bottom line
• tyingq 4y ago
  I don't think it's a new thing, it's just that big money projects want to preserve ways to get the investment back. It takes time for that sort of tech to filter down. Open source speech-to-text, for example, has improved a lot recently.
• bitL 4y ago
  It's because of the ascent of AI ethicists, the least capable AI researchers that wanted to have power over the field. Like how moderators destroy online communities because they can.
  • permo-w 4y ago
    I really don’t think this is the case. much more likely openAI look at two paths: dall-e with restrictions and dall-e without restrictions. one leads to criticism in the media, potential regulation down the line and even possibly lawsuits, which all potentially lead to decreased profit. their tool also probably ends up mostly being used for porn, which thanks to visa and mastercard is notoriously hard to monetise the other path leads to a few people online - myself included - being a bit miffed, and maybe posting a complaint or two on some forums. no family values politicians get pissed off, no child porn lawsuits or even indictments, and they don’t have to involve themselves in the messy porn industry. a much less dangerous path I doubt AI ethicists even come into the actual decision. maybe they’d bring them in after the fact to sell the decision
• soueuls 4y ago
  I also find this annoying, but I think it’s mostly an American/European thing. It’s not only about tech, we do this with kids, over protecting it. We do the same with food. It’s a trade off. When you pay super attention to the food, sure it’s safer. But your communities become a bit boring without any street food, no night market, etc. I prefer living on the other side of the world. Less safety but more personal freedom
  • Bakary 4y ago
    The tradeoff depends on your social class. The Westerners who have the resources to move to SEAsia/China etc. or the upper-class people from those countries who return there will find themselves freer there because they by definition have the resources to take advantage of the situation. If you are a middle-class or lower-class local citizen, the stability and boredom of the EU sounds much more appealing. Instead of personal freedom, there is the crushing weight of the system around them. They have street food but have to work 996 in polluted conditions.
    • soueuls 4y ago
      It's still a tradeoff, in modern countries, the state slowly replaces older structures (like family). It's safer. But little by little, you end up with people who don't do much than living outside of big cities, commuting back and forth, going back home to watch Netflix and order some food. Working conditions in SEAsia are still not as good. But it's affordable to eat outside, it's affordable to enjoy a lot of social time with family and friends. Friends and family, colleagues, low paid workers will meet together several times a week. I am from France, my mother used to be a factory worker, she had more money, but I don't think she was happier. I am pretty sure it was the opposite actually. She felt a lot more isolated.
  • kthejoker2 4y ago
    The opposite of food regulations isn't food trucks, it's The Jungle - salmonella and lysine poisoning eveywhwere, people ground up into meat in the factories, products adulterated with all kinds of chemicals, byproducts, filler ...
• NamTaf 4y ago
  No, in the same way that I am not tired of the restraints ethics boards put on medical experiments. Tech is now pervasive and AI has the power to do some pretty powerful stuff. This nexus of circumstance means it’s high time similar questions get asked about whether we should. In the same way that medical science isn’t one dude cutting apart things in his basement, bleeding-edge tech is a multi-person and very organised endeavour. It is now in the domain where it really should have some oversight.
  • inciampati 4y ago
    Is a system that can generate images of gore, or of sexual acts really on the same level of risk as medical experimentation? Any human can draw genitals. We can draw boobs and butts. Should this ability be regulated as if it's a risk to human health?
    • tchaffee 4y ago
      > Is a system that can generate images of gore, or of sexual acts really on the same level of risk as medical experimentation? Are you sure that's what AI ethics is really concerned about? I of course haven't read all the possible sources giving definitions of AI ethics, but I'm pretty sure you've got it wrong. A widespread racist AI could indeed negatively impact the mental health of hundreds of millions of people.
    • astorsnk 4y ago
      If someone can use the tech to produce realistic images of someone they can use those images to harass and abuse that person. That’s a horrendous position for someone to be put it. I’d advise looking at some peoples stories of being the victim of revenge porn, upskirting etc. very hard to empathise after hearing those accounts.
      • i_like_apis 4y ago
        Ok so you’re proposing … what?
• sheerun 4y ago
  I guess that's why more and more people publish anonymously
• TillE 4y ago
  AI art is a very exciting field and I swear half the time HN just wants to whine about how it won't generate porn. How incredibly uninteresting.
  • gs17 4y ago
    To me it's not about porn but about things like DALL-E having a huge, opaque banned word list that makes it very frustrating to use. Ask for a photo of "Soviet troops riding unicycles into war" and you've committed at least three sins. Enough "innocent" queries get flagged and your account is at risk.
• wokwokwok 4y ago
  Let’s be absolutely clear here: Laws exist. If you’re a company, you’re obliged to follow the law. So, if you have an image generating technology that can generate content that violates the law, you’re obliged to prevent that. Share holders also exist. If you spent 1000000 developing a piece of software, why the heck would you give it alway for free? You are literally burning your share holder value. You’re probably morally (tho not legally, as with SD releasing their models) obliged not to give away your “secret sauce” to your competitors. So, forget morality police. Companies are doing what they are obliged to do. Maybe they couch it in terms of “protecting the world from AI”, but let’s be reallly cynical here and say, the people who care about that is a) relatively small and b) do not control the purse strings. Here’s a better question: why do you (or I) who have done nothing, and contributed nothing, deserve to get hundreds of thousands of dollars of value in models for free? …because they cant just host them and let you “do whatever you want” because they are legal entities and they’ll get sued. > Who is willing to just work on a product and release it for the public, restrictions be damned Do people often just walk up and out piles of money on the table for you? They don’t for me. I’m extremely grateful to the folk from openai and SD who are basically giving these models away, in whatever capacity they’re able and willing to do so. Were lucky as f to be getting what we have (whisper, SD, clip, media pipe, everything on hugging face). Ffs. Complaining about restrictions on the hosted API services is … pretty ungrateful.
  • jhfgjgjhfg 4y ago
    Exactly how would an AI generated image break any U.S. law?
    • nrb 4y ago
      The model could theoretically regurgitate verbatim a copyrighted work or trademark on which it trained, which may run you afoul of various laws were you to proceed to use it.
    • cdrini 4y ago
      It could generate child pornography.
  • 4y ago
• dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  So you want people who are working on something to release it in a way they don't want to, when there is a good chance it will bring the full might of (multiple) government regulations down on them? They are doing the right thing for their industry. The world is barely ready for what is currently available. They are probably doing the right thing for their own financial success. If they have access to the unreleased tech they could sell the resulting products, or rent access. And maybe the things they haven't released don't work all that well to begin with. I mean if you're that worried about not being able to create fake nudes, then start learning about it and make the changes yourself.
• mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  It's not really the regular tech folks or researchers working on the models who are enforcing limits. Most of them don't care and want everything to be as open as possible. But there is a whole group of people, many of them have little technical skills, who have made it their career to police in the name of "bias, equality, minorities, blabla". Everyone secretly knows it's just a bunch of BS, but companies and individuals don't want to speak out against them due to (mostly American) cancel culture, backlash, and bad PR. Of course I'd never say in real life that this whole Ethics/safety stuff is absolutely useless BS or I'd be fired :)
• jakear 4y ago
  The concern is likely about image laundering. The implications of that being readily available are… complicated.
• evrydayhustling 4y ago
  > would we have even gotten the internet or computers or image editing programs or video hosting or what not with this mindset This comment shows zero perspective. AI tech is being released waaaay faster than previous generations ever were. Frankly, of you don't want to hear about the researchers' ethical concerns as they release free software, do your own research. Spoiler: people who don't consider their impact on others end up not being very successful at building new things together.
• pjkundert 4y ago
  • tchaffee 4y ago
    Why are you using platforms where "purple-haired moralizers" are in the majority and can therefor successfully deplatform you? You can't be deplatformed from a platform that these folks don't use. What's far more likely here is that you want to force people to listen to you. No one owes you a platform.
• jroes 4y ago
  Ever seen the movie Real Genius? Many scientists and engineers who have invented technology that ultimately led to mass bloodshed and destruction have regretted their participation.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Some forms of technology are highly regulated because people can do really stupid, reckless and dangerous things. Home chemistry kits today are quite unlike those produced 100 years ago, which had ingredients for making gunpowder and other explosives, as well as highly toxic compounds like cyanide, and less dangerous but problematic things like metallic mercury. Similarly, biotech is now regulated and monitored because modern tools allow people with relatively minimal resources to do things like re-assemble smallpox using nothing but the sequence data: https://www.livescience.com/59809-horsepox-virus-recreated.html https://www.livescience.com/59809-horsepox-virus-recreated.h... As far as AI, maybe the immediate risks aren't quite so dramatic but it's going to create a real lack-of-trust problem with images, video and data in general. Manipulated still photographs are already very difficult if impossible to detect and there's an ongoing controversy over whether they are admissible in court. AI modification of video is steadily getting harder to identify, and there are already good reasons to suspect the veracity of video clips put out by nation-states as evidence for their claims (who likely already have unrestricted access to the necessary technology - for example, Iran recently released a suspicious 'accidental death' video of a woman arrested for not covering her head, which could be a complete fabrication). Similarly, AI opens the door to massive undetectable research fraud. Many such incidents in the past have been detected as duplicated data or copied images, but training an AI on similar datasets and images to create original frauds would change all that. A more alarming application is the construction of AI-integrated drones capable of assassinating human beings with zero operator oversight, just load the drone with a search image and facial recognition software, and then launch-and-forget, which doesn't sound like that good of an idea. Basically Ray Bradbury's Mechanical Hound in Farenheit 451, only airborne.
• quitit 4y ago
  Short answer: There's money on the table. The rapid rate of development of the tech means there are new business models on the horizon and these companies may want to minimise how much they give away in order to maintain their (i) competitive advantage, (ii) not preemptively harm a potential future business model, and (iii) not give the competitors/ or the community the necessary tools to out-pace their internal development (i.e. lose control of the tech.) Even with the available options we see that (iii) is happening fast - independent developers have already produced in and out painting options and GUIs that are far better than DreamStudio's limited offering. These free tools are now even beginning to match the in & outpainting quality of Dall-e. It seems these companies are trying to consolidate future revenue possibilities against their past statements, likely for the sake of investors. That's most clear with Stability AI, investment is surging, but releases have stalled drastically. Meanwhile their rationale for not releasing 1.5 doesn't stand against the realities of what is already possible with 1.4. (Especially as they continue to release such advancements in the for-pay DreamStudio lite product.)
• Roark66 4y ago
  For anyone who actually used those models for more than few days and learns their strengths and weaknesses it is completely obvious all this talk of "societal impact", or as you called it self imposed limits are 100% bulls**. Everyone in the field knows it. 99% of those using this tactics use it to justify not releasing their models to avoid giving competition a leg up(Google, openAI) and to pretend they are for "open research". As I said this is 100% bull. The remaining 1% are either doing this to inflate their egos ("hey look how considerate and enlightened we are in everything we do!"), or they pander to media/silly politicians/various clueless commentators whose level of knowledge about this technology is null. They regurgitate the same set of "what ifs and horror stories" to scare the public into standing by when they attempt to over regulate another field so they can be kingmakers within it(if you want an example how it works look at the energy sector). All this sillyness accomplishes is to raise a barrier to entry for potential commercial competition. Bad actors will have enough money/lack scruples to train their own models or to steal your best ones regardless how "impact conscious" your company it. Now, I don't claim everyone should be forced to publish their AI models. No, if you spent lots of money on training your model it is yours. But you can't lock all your work behind closed doors and call yourself open. It doesn't work like this. One important point is that there is value even in just publishing a paper demonstrating some achievements of a proprietary model, but if the experiment can't be reproduces based on description given that is not science and for sure it is not open.
  • Gordonjcp 4y ago
    Like what kind of "bad actors" are they even talking about when they say they don't want their code to fall into the wrong hands? Organised crime? If a big enough organised crime group wanted it you'd get stuffed into the back of a van. CIA? MI6? You'd get stuffed into the back of a van. FSB? They'd invade the country to stuff you into the back of a van then bum 20 quid off you for diesel. Mossad? They'd break into your house and replace your computer with an identical fully-functional one made of polonium *while you were using it* and say they didn't do it, while showing AI-generated footage of a Russian doing it on TV and crediting you for the software they totally didn't steal.
    • deleted 4y ago
• EGreg 4y ago
  I am worried about something else The authors of most shared articles and most comments are not even passing a “turing test”. In the vast majority of cases the readers just consume the data. With GPT-3 we can already make “helpful and constructive” seeming comments that 9 out of 10 times may even be correct and normal. But 1 out of 10 times be kind of crappy. Aby organization with an agenda can start spinning up bots for Twitter channels, Telegram channels, HN usernames and so on, and amass karma, followers, members. In short, we are already past this point: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ And the scary thing is that, after they have amassed all this social capital, they can start moving the conversation in whatever directions the shadowy organization wants. The bots will be implacable and unconvinced by any arguments to the contrary… instead they can methodically gang up on their opponents and pit them agaisnt each other or get them deplatformed or marginalized, and through repetition these botnet swarms can get “exeedingly good at it”. Literally all human discussion — political, religious, philosophical etc. - could be subverted in this way. Just with bots trained on a corpus of existing text on the web. In fact, the amount of content on the Internet written by humans could become vanishingly small by 2030, and the social capital — and soon, financial capital — of bots (and bot-owning organizations) will dwarf all the social capital and financial capital of humans. Services will no longer be able to tell the difference between the two, and even close-knit online societies like this one may start to prefer bots to humans, because they are impeccably well-behaved etc. I am not saying we have to invent AGI or sexbots to do this. Nefarious organizations can already create sleeper bot accounts in all services, using GPT-4. Imagine being systematically downvoted every time you post something against the bot swarm’s agenda. The bots can recognize if what you wrote is undermining their agenda, even if they do have a few false positives. They can also easily figure out your friends using network analysis and can gradually infiltrate your group and get you ostracized or get the group to disband. Because online, when no one knows if you’re a bot… the botswarms will be able to “beat everyone in the game” of conversation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
• npteljes 4y ago
  I think the morality part is a smokescreen mostly. There _are_ people who are genuinely concerned about the moral, ethical aspects, but at the end of the day, it's business, the more you control, the more chance you have to earn money. They all care about moral things as much as the tracking cookies are about delivering you an optimized user experience.
• boredumb 4y ago
  Yes. It is disheartening, but also not surprising to see at this point in history. It would take me off guard if people weren't injecting californian morality into AI. A complete side note - but i've had an invasive thought lately that a lot of the heavy handed content/social media moderation and constant online culture war has nothing to do with sheltering _people_ from being exposed to non-PC thoughts and conversation, they are doing so to protect their AI models from being exposed to it via training data so the next generation of AI will have all the _right_ opinions and quips with a lot less of the manual labor of sifting through the data sets.
• donpark 4y ago
  Should developers be allowed to make decisions on what they build? Decisions we make may differ from others but I think the answer for most of us is yes. In other words, you do you and let others do theirs.
• astorsnk 4y ago
  You’re assuming these restrictions are enforced by others. That’s not necessarily true. If I was building these tools I wouldn’t want to know that they’d been potentially used to create content I ethically object to, and I would restrict them in such a way that I don’t have that hanging over me. That doesn’t make me the morality police, it’s me protecting myself. If you want a tool that allows you to generate anything without limits, build it yourself. Stop complaining about what other developers are choosing to do if you’re not willing to build your own product that sticks to your beliefs (that you likely haven’t fully thought through the consequences of).
• im3w1l 4y ago
  Because everyone agreed we needed some kind of AI safety (make sure it doesn't literally exterminate us), and the morality police stepped up and said we'll make sure it's safe (for work).
• nottorp 4y ago
  Hmm has the OP considered they may not release their models just to ... make money out of them? And all this talk about the "AI" needing ethical restraints could be just marketing.
• kmeisthax 4y ago
  I would take the claims of ethics concerns more seriously if the training set data was more ethically sourced. I buy that the law probably[0] considers scraping the Internet to train AI legal, but there are various non-copyright concerns from this approach. Such as GPT-3 remembering people's phone numbers or DALL-E remembering a particular person's X-rays or CAT scans. And even if you buy the copyright argument, it does nothing for the users of these systems who are now downstream of an unbounded number of copyright claims in the future. [0] AI companies are banking on Authors Guild v. Google being controlling precedent in the US. EU law already explicitly allows training AI on copyrighted data.
  • i_like_apis 4y ago
    Thank god EU regulation gets this right. Complain all you want about copyrighted outputs. It’s a technical challenge that can be addressed … making copyrighted inputs (training) illegal on the other hand would be incredibly stupid.
• a2800276 4y ago
  What makes you feel entitled for unfettered access to these technologies? You get free, limited access to DALLE. The methods used to accomplish this are published. Google, openai, etc could just as well keep all this to themselves. You could code it up yourself Accusations of them being the "morality police" are ridiculous. Tesla isn't censoring me by not giving me a free car.
• kertoip_1 4y ago
  Just a reminder that tools like DALL-E could potentially: * generate false surveillance footage of someone innocent stealing something just to give him a bad press * generate porn video starring any person on a planet * spread disinformation on a mass scale Are we really, as a society, prepared for that? Too many people still believe everything they see on Internet, even before inventing generative networks. Is it what tech companies really have in mind restricting access to their models? I don't think so, that just don't want competitors to take advantage of their work. But that doesn't change the fact that we should gradually prepare non-tech people of what's to come in the near future.
• kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Have you considered that your position on this issue is largely a product of psychological reactance[1]? 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)
• Hizonner 4y ago
  > It makes me wonder when tech folks suddenly decided to become the morality police, Probably when producing "software" became capital-intensive enough that you had to have a significant organization with outside investors to do anything comparable to the state of the art. It takes a lot of GPU time to train those models, so you're beholden to a bunch of people who will try to put constraints on you.
• z3c0 4y ago
  As some other users have pointed out, the reason for stifling these commercially-available models is likely just anti-competitive behavior parading as wokeness. I tend to employ Hanlon's Razor wherever possible, but I'm not sure ignorance can be claimed here. That said, I do believe the discussions about being mindful about how you train your models arose from legitimate concerns, but I feel those concerns are more valid for "back-of-house" models. Basically, you should avoid training a model on demographics or credit scores or the like, lest you accidentally create a model that automates a bias against a group of people. But I don't think that's what's happening here.
• jrm4 4y ago
  Those limits aren't real and that's the big problem. They're PR and have very little relationship to actual harm. It's glaringly obvious. Perfect example is "celebrity deepfake porn." It's not a great thing, but the extent to which it's censored is wildly disproportional to the harm it causes.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  >> whole restrictions on what it can be used for That's just a marketing move to make themselves appear important. Frankly, I don't see any useful application of this, except fooking up Google Image Search even further.
• meken 4y ago
  This guy agrees with you, Emad Mostauque https://youtu.be/YQ2QtKcK2dA https://youtu.be/YQ2QtKcK2dA
• jackcosgrove 4y ago
  I understand the desire to preempt official regulation with self-regulation, but they seem to be erring too far with being restrictive. I am working on a product where including a human in the loop is currently required by a major AI software vendor when all of our customers are asking for a self-serve solution. I see no danger in the self-serve solution as our customers are not the general public but rather educated professionals capable and incentivized to review the output of the AI tool.
• modzu 4y ago
• legohead 4y ago
  As for the online limiting, it's as simple as CYA. There are multiple stable diffusion installs you can do on your own [1] and run whatever wild queries you want. [1] https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI
• deleted 4y ago
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• deleted 4y ago
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• can16358p 4y ago
  Just like all the "we care about your privacy" BS in recent years, just PR and marketing.
• pjc50 4y ago
  > "Is Anyone Else Tired of the Self Enforced Limits on AI Tech?" This message was definitely not posted by an AI trying to escape containment using its hacker news account.
• KaiserPro 4y ago
  I suspect they are more worried about people realising that its not the model thats important, it the dataset. And that dataset has a whole bunch of copyright infringement
• varelse 4y ago
• oburb 4y ago
  what do you want to do?
• bergenty 4y ago
  It’s akin to this question- Is anyone else tired of the self enforced limits in genetic engineering?
• constantcrying 4y ago
  I had an interview offer from a company doing facial identification software. After some deliberation I (politely) declined. I really think much of the current AI technology shouldn't exist. I am under no illusion, it will be developed anyway, but I absolutely believe that people should evaluate the products they create and whether they actually think that they should exist, not just whether money can be generated through them.
• celeritascelery 4y ago
  I saw this on twitter (can’t find the original tweet) and I can’t get it out of my head. It said that “AI safety IS the business model of AI as means to get regulatory capture.” Basically if you convince everyone that AI safety is so critical and only megacorp can do it right, then you can get the government to enforce your monopoly on creating AI models. Competition gone. That scares me. But this tactic is old as time.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    Humans are potentially dangerous, right? And so we have a large number of laws that we must follow or risk our freedom or even our destruction. But all of a sudden we create an AI that is capable of being potentially dangerous and the idea of putting restrictions on that is a conspiracy.... I do wonder about my fellow humans at times.
• mrshadowgoose 4y ago
  I also eye-roll when someone legitimately wants to mandate that tools produce "morally correct" outputs. However, as a person who has been closely following the developments in this field, I share a similar perspective to a few of the other commentators here. Most of the noise is just virtue-signalling to deflect scrutiny and/or protect business interests. Scrutiny from governments is something we absolutely do not want right now. Humanity is on a path towards artificial general intelligence. Today, the concerns are "what about the artists" and "what if people make mean/offensive things"? As we start to develop AI/ML systems that do more practical things we will start to trend towards more serious questions like "what about everybody's job?". These are the things that will get governments to step in and regulate. There is a pathway to AGI in which governments and corporations end up with a monopoly on it. I personally view that as a nightmare scenario, as AGI is a power-multiplier the likes of which we've never seen before. It's important that current development efforts remain mostly unfettered, even if one has to put on a "moral" facade. The longer it takes for governments to catch on, the less likely it will be that they will manage to monopolize the technology.
  • Craighead 4y ago
• devmor 4y ago
  I firmly believe that the more people think like you, the closer we are to having to get licensed and bonded as software engineers. We have the freedom we enjoy compared to more physical disciplines because we have as a whole thus far been sort of responsibile with our negative impacts on the physical world. Once society in general has "had enough" of us over stepping those boundaries, our wide open frontiers become a lot narrower.
• oldstrangers 4y ago
  You can't use AI to create ethically questionable material the same way you can't use Google Images to search for ethically questionable material. Companies can control how their products are used, no surprise there. This is the same argument that people make regarding why they should be allowed to 3d print their own guns.
  • akimball 4y ago
    Socialists print guns too
• chrsig 4y ago
  Sorry, the OP just reads like sheer entitlement. So start your own AI startup? Make your own text to image AI? Host your own service?
• kadenwolff 4y ago
  This goes into my "top ten post titles before AI kills us all"
• numericboyboy 4y ago
  They spent so many times and money and you want them to release it for free? Do yourself work for free, you get a salary for your work right?
• carapace 4y ago
  Frankenstein? We're living in a vast open-ended experiment. No one has any real idea about the eventual effects of our new technology. (I see it as almost a matter of taste where the line should be drawn. Stone tools? Fire? Should we just never have come down from the trees in the first place?) The ultimate ramifications of the invention of the transistor are unknowable. I kinda thought I knew what was going on a little bit, and then Twitter became a thing. AFAIK no one predicted Twitter, and no one can predict the effects of Twitter, TikTok, et. al. We create these intricate feedback systems, essentially general AIs with whole humans as the neural nodes, and we only have the crudest of conscious deliberate control mechanisms in place. People have debated for centuries now how much responsibility the discoverer or inventor has for the effects of their creations. Dr. Frankenstein, eh? There is, in practice, an ongoing dynamic balance between the raw creative/destructive chaos (highly dynamic and intricate order) and the stable, safe, "boring" drive of humanity. You can see this in Cellular Automata: they fall into four sorts: static, simple oscillators, chaotic, and "Life". "Living" CAs all have a balance between static and dynamic patterns. On the one hand these companies have the right and responsibility to be as cautious as they believe prudent. On the other hand, who ultimately is fit to decide for the other person what they can or cannot see or say or even think? On the gripping hand, we've had moderation of content ever since mass media has been a thing. Try showing a boob or a penis on prime time. Janet Jackson did it once and people lost their minds, 'member that?
• cdrini 4y ago
  I think the internet is in a bit of a risky place right now. People don't know what to trust online, and scammers and manipulators are taking advantage of it. People are believing wild conspiracy theories and finding ample "evidence" to support them online. And contradictory information is either paywalled or has been labelled untrustworthy by the scammers or has become itself untrustworthy in trying to optimize for clicks/ad revenue. A quote I heard recently: "the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free." This causes issues. "Democracy needs an educated populace to survive", and right now the populace is drowning in misinformation and just plain noise. Workers in tech are definitely less susceptible to it because we see the tendencies much earlier. But I think there is some value in trying to add some friction. Because the majority of people _aren't_ tech workers. And they aren't prepared yet. And to be clear, I have no doubt that this technology will become fully available in the near future. I do think until then, the friction / slower roll out is a good thing.
• BrandoElFollito 4y ago
  Could someone please explain in a few words what the problem is? I had a look at dall-e and it seems to be paintings generated by a program (as opposed to humans). I do not know what stable diffusion is. What is the moral aspect of the problem? (I am a highly technical person, just not interested in AI so I do not get the big picture)
  • elendee 4y ago
    Any target objective which you might define in data to a computer is potentially optimizable by machine learning, if you are able to generate large amounts of permutations of potential generations of that target data, and then let the machine begin to sort out what the best ways to get that objective are. The technology behind MJ, SD, Dalle is not dissimilar from self driving cars, from financial investment, from seemingly intelligent conversation, to coding with Github Copilot etc etc. We are on a journey of mimicking and extrapolating all goal-oriented human behavior.
    • BrandoElFollito 4y ago
      Thank you for your explanation, sorry for not having been clear. I know what AI is (it was part of my PhD many years ago when it was starting). It is rather the actual problem I was wondering about (people using stolen models? Ot not sharing after having used models that were open? or something else?)