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> The new model was trained on audio data from FreeSound and the Free Music Archive. This allowed us to create an open audio model while respecting creator righ

> The new model was trained on audio data from FreeSound and the Free Music Archive. This allowed us to create an open audio model while respecting creator rights. This feels like the “Ethereum merge moment” for AI art. Now that there exists a prominent example with the big ethical obstacle (Proof of Work in the case of Ethereum, nonconsensual data-gathering in the case of generative AI) removed, we can actually have interesting conversations about the ethics of these things. In the past I’ve pushed back on people who made the argument that “generative AI intrinsically requires theft from artists”, but the terrible quality of models trained on public domain data made it difficult to make that argument in earnest, even if I knew I was right in the abstract.

rfoo 2y ago
Why is Proof of Work less ethical than Proof of Rich a.k.a. rich being gradually more rich without doing anything? Not saying PoW is safer (it's not), but less ethical is pretty a bold claim.
- rpicard 2y ago
  Environmental impact of the proof of work algorithms is my understanding.
  - toenail 2y ago
    Proof of work mining is probably the only industry on the planet that has the potential to be carbon negative AND profitable.
    - foota 2y ago
      Renewable energy?
      - toenail 2y ago
        Waste energy like unused methane, flare gas and the like.
    - Uehreka 2y ago
      (sigh) Is this the methane flaring argument, or Peter Thiel’s “windmills in Vermont”?
      - toenail 2y ago
        (sigh) Do you expect a reply when you start like this?
        Uehreka 2y ago
        I don’t really care either way. I’m tired of having to debunk the same sloppy arguments year after year.
        toenail 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. If you can't follow the guidelines it would probably better to remain quiet.
- Uehreka 2y ago
  The environmental impact. And yes, I know, 0.5%, but my issue was always that if PoW currencies went from being a niche subculture to a point where it was used for everyday exchange (many people were arguing that this would and should happen) that 0.5% would surely go up by a great deal. To a point where crypto had to clear a super high bar of usefulness to counterbalance the harm it would do. To be fair, AI training also has a big carbon footprint, but I feel like the utility provided by AI makes it easier to argue that its usefulness counterbalances its ecological harm.
  - avarun 2y ago
    There is no "environmental impact". Environmental impact comes from energy production, not energy usage. It's incoherent to argue others should tamper down their energy usage because most folks producing energy aren't doing it in an ethical way.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Ultimately any proof-of-work system has to burn joules rather than clock cycles (because any race on cycles-per-joule is rapidly caught up), and that makes it clearer where the waste is: to be economically stable, in the face of adversarial actions by other nation states who sometimes have a vested interest in undermining your currency so actively seek the chaos and loss of trust in a double-spend event, your currency has to be backed by more electricity than any hostile power can spend on breaking it.
    - skybrian 2y ago
      It seems you've come up with a proof that there's no such thing as wasting electricity. When you prove an extraordinary claim like that, it's time to go back and figure out how you got it wrong.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > It's incoherent to argue others should tamper down their energy usage because most folks producing energy aren't doing it in an ethical way. There's a general consensus that paying someone else to do your dirty work doesn't free you of the moral (or, usually, legal) culpability for the damage done. If you knowingly direct your money towards unethical providers, you are directly increasing the demand for unethical behavior. (That's assuming that the producers themselves are responsible for the ethics. If a producer is doing its best to convert to clean energy as fast as possible, they may be entirely in the clear but POW would still be unethical. In that scenario POW is placing strain on the limited clean energy supplies, forcing the producer to use more fossil fuels than they'd otherwise need to.)
- pa7x1 2y ago
  How do the rich become gradually richer under PoS? I'm flabbergasted by the level of math education. Assume we have 2 validators in the network; the first one owns 90% of the network, the second one owns 10%. Lets call them Whale and Shrimpy, respectively. To make the numbers round let's assume total circulating supply of ETH is 100 initially and that the yield resulting from being a validator is 10% per year. After the first year, 10 new ETH will have been minted. Whale would have gotten 9 ETH, and Shrimpy would have gotten 1 ETH. OP is assuming that as 9 is bigger than 1, Whale is getting richer faster than Shrimpy. But, let's look at the final situation globally. At year 0: Total ETH circulating supply: 100 ETH Whale has 90 ETH. Owns 90% of the network. Shrimpy has 10 ETH. Owns 10% of the network. At year 1: Total ETH circulating supply: 110 ETH Whale has 99 ETH. Owns 90% of the network. Shrimpy has 11 ETH. Owns 10% of the network. Whale has exactly the same network ownership after validating for 1 whole year, the network is not centralizing at all! The rich are not getting richer any faster than the poor. TL;DR: Friends don't let friends skip elementary math classes.
  - rfoo 2y ago
    Sure, friends also won't let friends skip the fact that circulating supply of ETH is now decreasing instead of increasing. Also, only ~30% tokens are staked. The 30% who chose to stake essentially tax the other 70% in use. Each of the validator do the same amount of work (ok, strictly speaking you get to do more when you have more ETH staked, but being a validator is cheap and does not cost significantly more energy even if you are being selected more frequently because running one proposal is too cheap, that's the whole environmental point, right?) except what they receive is proportioned to how much they stake. I hate being mean, but sorry, remembering to check one's assumption is a habit I gained after elementary school, so maybe that's too hard for you.
    - pa7x1 2y ago
      > Sure, friends also won't let friends skip the fact that circulating supply of ETH is now decreasing instead of increasing. This changes absolutely nothing of the calculation. Furthermore, the change in circulating supply last year was of 0.07%. > Also, only ~30% tokens are staked. Correct. > The 30% who chose to stake essentially tax the other 70% in use. There is something called opportunity cost. With the existence of liquid staking derivatives the choice to stake or not is one of opportunity cost. Plenty of people may consider the return observed by staking insufficient given the opportunity cost and additional risks. Participating in staking is fully permissionless, stakers are not taxing non-stakers. They are being remunerated for their work. > Each of the validator do exactly same amount of work (that's the point, right) except what they receive is proportioned to how much they stake. Incorrect. A staker does proportionate amount of work to its stake. That's why it gets paid more. A staker gets paid for fulfilling its duties as defined in the protocol (attesting, proposing blocks, participating in sync committees). For each of those things there are some rewards and some punishments in case you fail to fulfill them. If a staker has more validators running you simply fulfill more of those duties more often, hence your reward scales linearly with number of validators.
Workaccount2 2y ago
The idea that AI trained on artist created content is theft is kind of ridiculous anyway. Transformers aren't large archives of data with needles and thread to sew together pieces. The whole argument is meant to stifle an existential threat, not to halt some illegal transgression. If they cared about the latter a simple copyright filter on the output of the models would be all that's needed.
- JohnKemeny 2y ago
  I think you should read the case material for NY Times v OpenAI and Microsoft. It literally says that within ChatGPT is stored, verbatim, large archives of NY Times articles and that they were able to retrieve them through their API.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    ..which makes no sense. It is either an argument of ignorance or of purposeful deceit. There is no coherent data corpus (compressed or not) in ChatGPT. What is stored are weights that create a string of tokens that can recreate excerpts data that it was trained on, with some imperfect level of accuracy. Which I agree is problematic, and OpenAI doesn't have the right to disseminate that. But that doesn't mean OpenAI doesn't have the right to train on it. Content creators are doing a purposeful slight of hand to confabulate "outputting copyrighted data" with "training on copyrighted data". It's illegal for me to read an NYT article and recite it from memory onto my blog. It's not illegal for me to read an NYT article and write my own summary of the article's contents on my blog. This has been true forever and has forever been a staple in new content creation.
    - Philip-J-Fry 2y ago
      When you describe ChatGPT as just a model with weights that can create a string of tokens, is it any different from any lossless compression algorithm? I'm sure if I had a JPEG of some copyrighted raw image it could still be argued that it is the same image. JPEG is imperfect, the result you get is the same every time you open it but it's not the same as the original input data. ChatGPT would give you the same output every time, and it does if you turn off the "temperature" setting. Introduce a bit of randomness into a JPEG decoder and functionally what's the difference? A slightly different string of tokens for ChatGPT versus a slightly different collection of pixels for a JPEG.
deleted 2y ago
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hecanjog 2y ago
I also highly doubt anyone who signed agreements to have their music included in the Free Music Archive would have been OK with this. The particular type of license was important to contributors and there's a difference between allowing for rebroadcast without paying royalties and allowing for derivative works... I don't really care to argue the point, but it's why there were so many different types of licenses for the original FMA. This just glosses over all that.
- blargey 2y ago
  If you look at the repo where the model is actually hosted they specify > All audio files are licensed under CC0, CC BY, or CC Sampling+. These explicitly permit derivative works and commercial use. > Attribution for all audio recordings used to train Stable Audio Open 1.0 can be found in this repository. So it’s not being glossed over, and licenses are being abided by in good faith imo. I wish they’d just added a sentence to their press release specifying this, though, since I agree it looks suspect if all you have to go by is that one line. (Link: https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-audio-open-1.0#datasets-used https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-audio-open-1.0#dat... )
  - hecanjog 2y ago
    That's an important clarification, thanks! The full FMA database has lots of music that isn't licensed that way.
TaylorAlexander 2y ago
I’m so happy to see this! I’ve been saying for a while, if they focused on sample efficiency and building large public datasets, including encouraging Twitter and other social media sites to add image license options and also encouraging people to add alt text (which would also help the vision impaired!), they really could build the models they want while also respecting creatives, thus avoiding pissing a bunch of people off. It’s nice to see Stability step up and actually train on open data!
ancientworldnow 2y ago
This has been Adobe Firefly's value proposition for months now. It works fine and is already being utilized in professional workflows with the blessing of lawyers.
hapticmonkey 2y ago
If you're worried about Proof of Work leading to giant server farms using huge amounts of energy, then I've got something to tell you about AI...
_940h 2y ago
The "Etherium merge moment" is entirely different and it irks me to see it compared favorably with this project. It didn't 'solve' proof of work. It assigned positive value to past environmental harms. It prevents more proof of work, but doesn't solve past harms. The only 'solution' (more a mitigation) to Etherium proof of work's environmental harms is to devalue it. Unlike your example, this project actually seems to be a net positive for society that wasn't built on top of unnecessary harms.
deleted 2y ago
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rfoo 2y ago

Why is Proof of Work less ethical than Proof of Rich a.k.a. rich being gradually more rich without doing anything? Not saying PoW is safer (it's not), but less ethical is pretty a bold claim.

rpicard 2y ago
Environmental impact of the proof of work algorithms is my understanding.
- toenail 2y ago
  Proof of work mining is probably the only industry on the planet that has the potential to be carbon negative AND profitable.
  - foota 2y ago
    Renewable energy?
    - toenail 2y ago
      Waste energy like unused methane, flare gas and the like.
  - Uehreka 2y ago
    (sigh) Is this the methane flaring argument, or Peter Thiel’s “windmills in Vermont”?
    - toenail 2y ago
      (sigh) Do you expect a reply when you start like this?
      - Uehreka 2y ago
        I don’t really care either way. I’m tired of having to debunk the same sloppy arguments year after year.
        toenail 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. If you can't follow the guidelines it would probably better to remain quiet.
Uehreka 2y ago
The environmental impact. And yes, I know, 0.5%, but my issue was always that if PoW currencies went from being a niche subculture to a point where it was used for everyday exchange (many people were arguing that this would and should happen) that 0.5% would surely go up by a great deal. To a point where crypto had to clear a super high bar of usefulness to counterbalance the harm it would do. To be fair, AI training also has a big carbon footprint, but I feel like the utility provided by AI makes it easier to argue that its usefulness counterbalances its ecological harm.
- avarun 2y ago
  There is no "environmental impact". Environmental impact comes from energy production, not energy usage. It's incoherent to argue others should tamper down their energy usage because most folks producing energy aren't doing it in an ethical way.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Ultimately any proof-of-work system has to burn joules rather than clock cycles (because any race on cycles-per-joule is rapidly caught up), and that makes it clearer where the waste is: to be economically stable, in the face of adversarial actions by other nation states who sometimes have a vested interest in undermining your currency so actively seek the chaos and loss of trust in a double-spend event, your currency has to be backed by more electricity than any hostile power can spend on breaking it.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    It seems you've come up with a proof that there's no such thing as wasting electricity. When you prove an extraordinary claim like that, it's time to go back and figure out how you got it wrong.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > It's incoherent to argue others should tamper down their energy usage because most folks producing energy aren't doing it in an ethical way. There's a general consensus that paying someone else to do your dirty work doesn't free you of the moral (or, usually, legal) culpability for the damage done. If you knowingly direct your money towards unethical providers, you are directly increasing the demand for unethical behavior. (That's assuming that the producers themselves are responsible for the ethics. If a producer is doing its best to convert to clean energy as fast as possible, they may be entirely in the clear but POW would still be unethical. In that scenario POW is placing strain on the limited clean energy supplies, forcing the producer to use more fossil fuels than they'd otherwise need to.)
pa7x1 2y ago
How do the rich become gradually richer under PoS? I'm flabbergasted by the level of math education. Assume we have 2 validators in the network; the first one owns 90% of the network, the second one owns 10%. Lets call them Whale and Shrimpy, respectively. To make the numbers round let's assume total circulating supply of ETH is 100 initially and that the yield resulting from being a validator is 10% per year. After the first year, 10 new ETH will have been minted. Whale would have gotten 9 ETH, and Shrimpy would have gotten 1 ETH. OP is assuming that as 9 is bigger than 1, Whale is getting richer faster than Shrimpy. But, let's look at the final situation globally. At year 0: Total ETH circulating supply: 100 ETH Whale has 90 ETH. Owns 90% of the network. Shrimpy has 10 ETH. Owns 10% of the network. At year 1: Total ETH circulating supply: 110 ETH Whale has 99 ETH. Owns 90% of the network. Shrimpy has 11 ETH. Owns 10% of the network. Whale has exactly the same network ownership after validating for 1 whole year, the network is not centralizing at all! The rich are not getting richer any faster than the poor. TL;DR: Friends don't let friends skip elementary math classes.
- rfoo 2y ago
  Sure, friends also won't let friends skip the fact that circulating supply of ETH is now decreasing instead of increasing. Also, only ~30% tokens are staked. The 30% who chose to stake essentially tax the other 70% in use. Each of the validator do the same amount of work (ok, strictly speaking you get to do more when you have more ETH staked, but being a validator is cheap and does not cost significantly more energy even if you are being selected more frequently because running one proposal is too cheap, that's the whole environmental point, right?) except what they receive is proportioned to how much they stake. I hate being mean, but sorry, remembering to check one's assumption is a habit I gained after elementary school, so maybe that's too hard for you.
  - pa7x1 2y ago
    > Sure, friends also won't let friends skip the fact that circulating supply of ETH is now decreasing instead of increasing. This changes absolutely nothing of the calculation. Furthermore, the change in circulating supply last year was of 0.07%. > Also, only ~30% tokens are staked. Correct. > The 30% who chose to stake essentially tax the other 70% in use. There is something called opportunity cost. With the existence of liquid staking derivatives the choice to stake or not is one of opportunity cost. Plenty of people may consider the return observed by staking insufficient given the opportunity cost and additional risks. Participating in staking is fully permissionless, stakers are not taxing non-stakers. They are being remunerated for their work. > Each of the validator do exactly same amount of work (that's the point, right) except what they receive is proportioned to how much they stake. Incorrect. A staker does proportionate amount of work to its stake. That's why it gets paid more. A staker gets paid for fulfilling its duties as defined in the protocol (attesting, proposing blocks, participating in sync committees). For each of those things there are some rewards and some punishments in case you fail to fulfill them. If a staker has more validators running you simply fulfill more of those duties more often, hence your reward scales linearly with number of validators.

Workaccount2 2y ago

The idea that AI trained on artist created content is theft is kind of ridiculous anyway. Transformers aren't large archives of data with needles and thread to sew together pieces. The whole argument is meant to stifle an existential threat, not to halt some illegal transgression. If they cared about the latter a simple copyright filter on the output of the models would be all that's needed.

JohnKemeny 2y ago
I think you should read the case material for NY Times v OpenAI and Microsoft. It literally says that within ChatGPT is stored, verbatim, large archives of NY Times articles and that they were able to retrieve them through their API.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  ..which makes no sense. It is either an argument of ignorance or of purposeful deceit. There is no coherent data corpus (compressed or not) in ChatGPT. What is stored are weights that create a string of tokens that can recreate excerpts data that it was trained on, with some imperfect level of accuracy. Which I agree is problematic, and OpenAI doesn't have the right to disseminate that. But that doesn't mean OpenAI doesn't have the right to train on it. Content creators are doing a purposeful slight of hand to confabulate "outputting copyrighted data" with "training on copyrighted data". It's illegal for me to read an NYT article and recite it from memory onto my blog. It's not illegal for me to read an NYT article and write my own summary of the article's contents on my blog. This has been true forever and has forever been a staple in new content creation.
  - Philip-J-Fry 2y ago
    When you describe ChatGPT as just a model with weights that can create a string of tokens, is it any different from any lossless compression algorithm? I'm sure if I had a JPEG of some copyrighted raw image it could still be argued that it is the same image. JPEG is imperfect, the result you get is the same every time you open it but it's not the same as the original input data. ChatGPT would give you the same output every time, and it does if you turn off the "temperature" setting. Introduce a bit of randomness into a JPEG decoder and functionally what's the difference? A slightly different string of tokens for ChatGPT versus a slightly different collection of pixels for a JPEG.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hecanjog 2y ago

I also highly doubt anyone who signed agreements to have their music included in the Free Music Archive would have been OK with this. The particular type of license was important to contributors and there's a difference between allowing for rebroadcast without paying royalties and allowing for derivative works... I don't really care to argue the point, but it's why there were so many different types of licenses for the original FMA. This just glosses over all that.

blargey 2y ago
If you look at the repo where the model is actually hosted they specify > All audio files are licensed under CC0, CC BY, or CC Sampling+. These explicitly permit derivative works and commercial use. > Attribution for all audio recordings used to train Stable Audio Open 1.0 can be found in this repository. So it’s not being glossed over, and licenses are being abided by in good faith imo. I wish they’d just added a sentence to their press release specifying this, though, since I agree it looks suspect if all you have to go by is that one line. (Link: https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-audio-open-1.0#datasets-used https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-audio-open-1.0#dat... )
- hecanjog 2y ago
  That's an important clarification, thanks! The full FMA database has lots of music that isn't licensed that way.

TaylorAlexander 2y ago

I’m so happy to see this! I’ve been saying for a while, if they focused on sample efficiency and building large public datasets, including encouraging Twitter and other social media sites to add image license options and also encouraging people to add alt text (which would also help the vision impaired!), they really could build the models they want while also respecting creatives, thus avoiding pissing a bunch of people off. It’s nice to see Stability step up and actually train on open data!

ancientworldnow 2y ago

This has been Adobe Firefly's value proposition for months now. It works fine and is already being utilized in professional workflows with the blessing of lawyers.

hapticmonkey 2y ago

If you're worried about Proof of Work leading to giant server farms using huge amounts of energy, then I've got something to tell you about AI...

_940h 2y ago

The "Etherium merge moment" is entirely different and it irks me to see it compared favorably with this project. It didn't 'solve' proof of work. It assigned positive value to past environmental harms. It prevents more proof of work, but doesn't solve past harms. The only 'solution' (more a mitigation) to Etherium proof of work's environmental harms is to devalue it. Unlike your example, this project actually seems to be a net positive for society that wasn't built on top of unnecessary harms.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]