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Kickstarter shuts down campaign for Unstable Diffusion amid changing guidelines
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jackmott 4y agoPeople weaponizing “non consensual porn” to attack this are going to also need to ban pencils, keyboards, and police thoughts. good luck! and merry christmas
- ceejayoz 4y agoThat’s like saying there’s no difference between knives and nukes, because both kill people. The ease of it matters.
- ziml77 4y agoEase, scale, and physical disconnect are all factors.
- kevingadd 4y agodeepfakes and pencil sketched nudes are thoroughly different in multiple ways
- brookst 4y agoNot if your whole worldview rests on reductive arguments. It’s ok to look in shop windows, therefore it’s ok to look in any window, therefore it’s ok to use ultra telephoto lenses to photograph naked people in their homes. It’s hypocritical to ban fully automatic machine guns if you don’t also ban pillows, because both can be used to kill people. And so on. There is a whole personality type that seems to be based on holding views that depend on ignoring all context in order to produce absurd results while claiming to be highly principled.
- DannyBee 4y agoI'm with you. All of society has always rested on gradients and fuzzy lines. "highly principled" extremism, while nice in theory, has never made the world much better. Pragmatism is what has driven most advancement. That may not feel great to some people because it's rarely perfectly fair (among other things), but it doesn't change it's success.
- llanowarelves 4y agoThe legal system is exactly the opposite in establishing limits: canaries in the coal mine and the exceptions proving the rule. Not really anybody wants to be "First Amendment auditors" or the guy in Warren v Brandenburg, but they forced the issue to establish/discover limits. If what was legal was simply "what is average/normal/reasonable" then that likely would mean much less freedom. You can also be influenced socially through media (etc) either direction over time to change what the definition of "reasonable" is. Remember that Barack Obama ran on the now "extreme" position (that many non-Western countries like Japan still holds) that marriage is between a man and a woman only, a little more than a decade ago. Conversely, gay marriage was "extreme"/fringe back then.
- vorpalhex 4y agoFully automatic machine guns are quite banned. Using a telephoto to peer into someones window is also illegal as they typically have an expectation of privacy. Photoshopping a movie stars face onto a nude body has been around a long time and much of the fake porn of famous people was done this way, probably mostly by individuals. Please give it a google if you doubt me, at your own risk.
- c0m 4y ago> Using a telephoto to peer into someones window is also illegal as they typically have an expectation of privacy. In the US, in NY at least, they do not. A case about exactly this (telephoto lens photography through someone else's window, later displayed as art) didn't survive a motion to dismiss. This was upheld on appeal. Foster v Svenson (2015).
- jolancer 4y agoPhotoshop is a better example. Photoshop is better than any AI software for this.
- jandrese 4y agoI thought that argument was a bit weird. Did the Unstable Diffusion folks specifically add revenge porn to their training model? If so I could see why people were upset, but I didn't see any evidence of that happening.
- jolancer 4y agoNot to mention Photoshop. The problem is I honestly think if Photoshop came out for the first time in 2022 that it absolutely would get banned and be considered far too dangerous.
- jchw 4y agoUnrelated to all of this, I'm starting to feel like I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments on our behalf. I didn't and wouldn't have backed Unstable Diffusion, but people were willing to spend money on it, it seems clearly legal from our current understanding, and there's nothing in the Kickstarter that suggests it's malicious or would otherwise violate any ToS or guidelines; in fact the campaign seems careful to suggest that they were intentionally aiming on making it difficult to abuse, which I know people have feelings about here too, but the point is that this seems like a textbook example of a project that dotted its I's and crossed its T's. But some people didn't like it, I assume, and therefore they had to find a reason it violated their guidelines and shut it down. I know that objectivity and neutrality are no longer hot concepts, and I also understand that not everything from the way things "used" to run would still work today, but I can't help but feel this was just a completely unnecessary concession that helps nobody. Crowdfunding was supposed to empower people to directly support things that they wanted to see, but when it goes through gatekeepers like Kickstarter and Gofundme, they become the ones with all of the power to decide what things are allowed. I think it's probably all moot. Nobody would defend a campaign like this anyways, so trying to make the case that this is a(nother) bad precedent is impossible. People just simply don't give a shit anymore.
- baeaz 4y agoIt's not a moral problem, the morality angle is an excuse, these are just artists who don't want to be out of a job because of technological advances
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoNeutrality and impartiality means you're alt-right now.
- brookst 4y agoI’d agree with you if “platforms” were automated entities that just happen, like rain. But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with. It’s easy to sit back and complain about the precedent these people are setting that could be abused by other people at some point in the future. But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it?
- KMnO4 4y agoI find the technology gatekeeping to be appalling. How can people make the argument that this is “blatant theft from Greg Rutkowski“ but turn a blind eye to Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL-E, etc? At least Unstable Diffusion isn’t predominantly used for the same fantasy/illustrations that people love to generate on the other services.
- chpatrick 4y agoStable Diffusion removed Greg Rutkowski et al from the training data per their request, Unstable Diffusion is a project to fine-tune them back in.
- GaggiX 4y agoGreg Rutkowski was simply very present in the unknown dataset used by OpenAI for training CLIP-L/14, whereas when LAION trained the CLIP-H model it did so on the LAION dataset that seems to have far fewer references to this artist.
- chipgap98 4y agoI mean I have seen tons of people complaining about the use of those models on social media. I don't think that people are only objecting to this project. I don't agree with them, but I don't think its fair to say there hasn't been pushback on the other projects you mentioned.
- egypturnash 4y agoYou must not have any artists in your life, a lot of us are hollering that all of these things are massive copyright infringement machines that are trained on our hard work without any permission, never mind giving us a single penny of the money the companies building these things are making off of them.
- victor9000 4y agoWould your opinion change if these models were trained exclusively on works in the public domain? Do you consider it to be infringement if new and novel art is created simply in the style of other artists? If so, how should we treat art students when they try to recreate a previous work? It's also worth noting that producing new art is only a subset of possible use cases. So how should we treat new and novel photo-realistic images? Is that infringement too?
- barnabee 4y agoThis sort of thing is why, for all their faults, I think we need decentralisation and “crypto” to succeed. We need to replace platforms like Kickstarter with standards and protocols so that shutting things down because someone doesn’t like them (or even preventing people from behaving illegally, especially if you’re not the cops) can be made impossible. Let bad ideas be rejected by society, not blocked by someone claiming to act for society. Because inevitably they don’t represent everyone, and they always end up acting with self interest, no matter how good the initial intentions.
- vorpalhex 4y agoKickstarter and co will continue to lose trust and their base and be open to disruption by other companies. However, at least some of this is due to underlying payment providers. Those need to be gutted and replaced. See paypal and their $2,500 fee for saying mean things on the internet.
- PaulsWallet 4y agoKickstarter will not lose any trust with this decision and if anything they probably gained a decent amount of goodwill from artist and their fanbases.
- WASDx 4y agoRegulations serve a purpose. I am more afraid of what would happen if everything became decentralized. An effort I hope we can agree on was when platforms started removing COVID-19 misinformation.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- barnabee 4y agoRegulations are fine but enforcement via corporate gatekeepers is not, and neither is creating a world in which breaking the law is impossible. Regulations create consequences for breaking them, and that is a good thing. Pairing regulations with control that prevents crime and civil disobedience is something completely different.
- dymk 4y agoUnstable Diffusion will find another way to fund itself. From the article, looks like they may have already found a viable option. Artists will decry AI art for a few more months / years, then dust will settle, and we will still have ever-improving diffusion (or whatever the next iteration is) models. Slowly, people will realize that artists learn and copy from other artists much in the same way that current ML models do. Education about how these models work will improve, and the current mythology of "it's blatantly copy/pasting!" will subside, for the most part. We'll start to see a counter-protest against anti-AI artists who use tools like Photoshop or other digital tools, most of which have involved some amount of machine learning (e.g. the "heal brush" or "context aware fill") for a long time. AI art will start passing the "art turing test" at higher rates, and people will realize that whatever intrinsic spark / soul / whatever there is to art is mainly attributed to a narrative or story about the artist that exists outside of the canvas - and that the actual artistic contents of what lives on the canvas itself doesn't depend on a living, breathing thing if you make up a compelling narrative to support it. Artists displaced by this new ease of generating art will find new economic niches, and life will continue on.
- wslh 4y agoPorn is clearly missing in the HN title to focus at this specific target. Porn is one of the obvious uses of these techniques. Like it or not. Porn is not illegal and having this discussion in 2022 seems "puritanism" is alive. In the context of HN, it would be interesting to see how unstable diffusion will change the porn industry. I imagine anyone could contribute to the industry, if they want, modifying their identities. I think it was Axel Kuschevatzky [1] who said that the porn movie industry is the most conservative. Playing the same short scripts all the time. [1] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098024/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098024/
- mlboss 4y agoUnstable diffusion started collecting donation via their website https://equilibriumai.com/ https://equilibriumai.com/
- kristofferR 4y agoThanks, donated!
- throwaway675309 4y agoI and several other people I know have actually doubled our original pledges that we made on Kickstarter just as a giant figurative middle finger to the censorship clowns.
- mlboss 4y agoNSFW are one use-case for the new model training. SD is horrible in generating photo-realistic images with correct anatomy, UD is supposed to fix that. They will also be working on creating a better dataset which is partially human curated with proper cropping and text. They will be bringing artists that were removed from latest SD models. UD is the only currently community driven alternative. I hope they deliver on what they promised.
- saltminer 4y ago>They will be bringing artists that were removed from latest SD models. Is this referring to artists opting-out (i.e. requesting to have their work removed) from the datasets used to create SD models? Because if so, I fully support that. In fact, I think artists should have to explicitly opt-in to their work being used in ML models. You don't get to violate someone's license terms and then point to an opt-out form to absolve yourself of liability, regardless of how good your intentions are or being a crowd-funded venture unconnected to any corporations with armies of lawyers.
- NoahKAndrews 4y agoIt sounds like they're saying that they're going to use the opted-out art :/
- gernb 4y agoI guess Twitch needs to die in a fire then because it's entire premise (live streaming video games) is doing exactly that. Showing off artists work without their explicit opt-in.
- dymk 4y agoTheir license terms aren’t being violated. Artists give ArtStation and the like a license to use their uploads for training ML models. ML models also appear to be more fair-use respecting than some human artists, who blatantly trace artwork. The ML model does not have the physical space to trace the works it's trained on.
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- verdenti 4y ago[dead]
- mlboss 4y agoRelated to this, there is a gofundme campaign going on which promises to hire lobbyist against these technologies in Washington. https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-technologies https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-techno...
- dymk 4y agoProbably better to just give that money straight to artists by commissioning art
- iorrus 4y agoThere are other crowdfunding platforms that they can use. Kickstarter glory days are long past.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway675309 4y agoThe people behind unstable diffusion have created a dedicated means to donate to the cause: https://equilibriumai.com/index.html https://equilibriumai.com/index.html It's already up to the original amount that they intended to raise on Kickstarter. I have a feeling that all this negativity is just going to amplify the Streisand effect.
- wokwokwok 4y agoHere’s the thing though: Kickstarter can now safely say, “our brand is not associated with this porn generator”. …and, in the end the unstable folk got the money they wanted anyway? Isn't this a victory for everyone? Seems like a fuss about nothing to me. Freedom of association; don’t like what they’re doing? Don’t be involved with it.
- birracerveza 4y agoThis is good for Bitcoin
- foota 4y agoI assume that the artists style is essentially just mapping from their name into some latency space of styles, more or less, not necessarily that the model has memorized every individual's style. If that's the case, it would be interesting to see what happens if the AI purposefully isn't trained on art in some part of the style latent space, and to see if it's able to still generate art in that style. Taking this to a possible extreme, what if we trained it only on classical art work, would it be possible to get it to extrapolate to more modern styles, or to fine tune it with only a small number of, potentially, as people are calling for, paid samples?
- SergeAx 4y agoI really hope that Kickstarter is not another vendor-locked "we won't give you your backers' contacts" enterprise, and they just relaunch the campaign on another platform. Having competition in FOSS sector is the only way for it to thrive.
- 7to2 4y agoA beautiful illustration of the streisand effect I see. I had no idea this was a thing.