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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
by 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 agoThere 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 agoDefinitely. Framing it as morality when it is business risk is disingenuous though.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y agoDoing immoral things kinda fundamentally is a business risk. I'm not sure I see any tension or conflict between "We don't want to help make porn because some of us think it's bad" and "we don't want to help make porn because some of our regulators will think it's bad".
- svnt 4y agoDoing certain kinds of immoral things is doing business. They are only concerned about those that pose business risk. If they wanted to not contribute to the problem they could just not participate.