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A startup wants to democratize the tech behind DALL-E 2, consequences be damned – TechCrunch:
DALL-E 2, OpenAI's powerful text-to-image AI system, can create photos in the style of cartoonists, 19th century daguerreotypists, stop-motion animators and more. But it has an important, artificial limitation: a filter that prevents it from creating images depicting public figures and content deemed too toxic.
Now an open source alternative to DALL-E 2 is on the cusp of being released, and it'll have few — if any — such content filters.
London- and Los Altos-based startup Stability AI this week announced the release of a DALL-E 2-like system, Stable Diffusion, to just over a thousand researchers ahead of a public launch in the coming weeks. A collaboration between Stability AI, media creation company RunwayML, Heidelberg University researchers and the research groups EleutherAI and LAION, Stable Diffusion is designed to run on most high-end consumer hardware, generating 512×512-pixel images in just a few seconds given any text prompt.
"Stable Diffusion will allow both researchers and soon the public to run this under a range of conditions, democratizing image generation," Stability AI CEO and founder Emad Mostaque wrote in a blog post. "We look forward to the open ecosystem that will emerge around this and further models to truly explore the boundaries of latent space."
But Stable Diffusion's lack of safeguards compared to systems like DALL-E 2 poses tricky ethical questions for the AI community. Even if the results aren't perfectly convincing yet, making fake images of public figures opens a large can of worms. And making the raw components of the system freely available leaves the door open to bad actors who could train them on subjectively inappropriate content, like pornography and graphic violence.
[...] "Our benchmark models that we release are based on general web crawls and are designed to represent the collective imagery of humanity compressed into files a few gigabytes big," Mostaque said. "Aside from illegal content, there is minimal filtering, and it is on the user to use it as they will."
[...] Mostaque acknowledged that the tools could be used by bad actors to create "really nasty stuff," and CompVis says that the public release of the benchmark Stable Diffusion model will "incorporate ethical considerations." But Mostaque argues that — by making the tools freely available — it allows the community to develop countermeasures.
"We hope to be the catalyst to coordinate global open source AI, both independent and academic, to build vital infrastructure, models and tools to maximize our collective potential," Mostaque said. "This is amazing technology that can transform humanity for the better and should be open infrastructure for all."
[...] Stable Diffusion contains little in the way of mitigations besides training dataset filtering. So what's to prevent someone from generating, say, photorealistic images of protests, pornographic pictures of underage actors, "evidence" of fake moon landings and general misinformation? Nothing really. But Mostaque says that's the point.
"A percentage of people are simply unpleasant and weird, but that's humanity," Mostaque said. "Indeed, it is our belief this technology will be prevalent, and the paternalistic and somewhat condescending attitude of many AI aficionados is misguided in not trusting society ... We are taking significant safety measures including formulating cutting-edge tools to help mitigate potential harms across release and our own services. With hundreds of thousands developing on this model, we are confident the net benefit will be immensely positive and as billions use this tech harms will be negated."
What could possibly go wrong?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2022, @10:33PM (1 child)
It's a Silicon Valley startup
Who is bankrolling this, and why?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2022, @10:59PM
From TFA:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2022, @10:53PM (1 child)
AI gatekeepers can get bent.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 18 2022, @02:08PM
They have a content filter in place to prevent that.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 4, Funny) by isj on Wednesday August 17 2022, @11:07PM (2 children)
I've had craiyon work on "Queen Elizabeth with a beard, roasting corgies in a pit". No problem. The results were not that convincing, though
(Score: 3, Troll) by bussdriver on Thursday August 18 2022, @12:41AM
As we've all seen in recent years, you don't need any fake images to get millions of gullible people to believe any backward insane ideas and believe them to their death if not clearly causing their own death. Maybe this will just increase the number of people who actual drink the bleach by a little bit.
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Thursday August 18 2022, @05:39AM
Maybe it's only because you misspelt 'Corgis'? (Says Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=corgies) [google.com]
(Score: 2, Troll) by corey on Wednesday August 17 2022, @11:26PM (2 children)
As per subject. Now.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2022, @11:36PM
As per subject. Now.
Regulations are out of control! It's madness I tell ya!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 18 2022, @02:14PM
We need AI to be in charge of regulating AI.
Now before you inhale your diet coke and have a choking fit . . .
Please consider. All sorts of self dealing regulation is aloud:
The music industry regulates copyright -- to the detriment of free speech and other rights.
Corporations regulation corporate behavior.
Rich people regulate everything about how rich people are not taxed and get special treatment to acquire more wealth on the backs of everyone else.
Legislators regulate how legislators are permitted to conduct insider trading.
And much more.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 2, Touché) by anubi on Thursday August 18 2022, @12:24AM
Maybe keep marking instruments out of the hands of cartoonists too?
Geez, they have the skillz to show things as they see it!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2022, @12:44AM (2 children)
"the paternalistic and somewhat condescending attitude of many AI aficionados is misguided in not trusting society"
Will this guy be funding unrestricted genetic engineering too?
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2022, @02:12AM (1 child)
I hope so. We can fuck catgirls while our desktops churn out millions of racist memes.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2022, @04:30AM
With our penis tentacles