This whole holier-than-thou moralizing strikes me as trying to steer the conversation away from the real issue, which came into spotlight with Stable Diffusion - one of authorship/violating the IP rights of artists, who now have come down in force against their would be tech overlords who are in the process or repackaging and reselling their work.

This forced ideological posturing of 'if we give it to the plebes, they are going to generate something naughty with it' masks the somehow more cynically evil take of big tech, who are essentially taking the entire creative output of humanity and reselling it as their own, piecemeal.

Additionally I think the Dalle vs. Stable Diffusion comparison highlights the true masters of these people (or at least the ones they dare not cross) - corporations with powerful IP lawyers. Just ask Dalle to generate a picture with Mickey Mouse - it won't be able to do it.

> repackaging and reselling their work.

It's not their work unless it's identical, but in practice generated images are substantially different. Drawing in the style of is not copying, it's creative and it also depends on the "dialogue" with the prompter to get to the right image. The artist names added to the prompts act more like landmarks in the latent space, they are a useful shortcut to specifying the style.

If you look at the data itself it's ridiculous - the dataset is 2.3 billion images and the model 4.6 GB, that means it keeps a 2 byte summary from each work it "copies".

It’s not your work unless it’s identical is not how existing copyright law works so not sure why it would be how these things should be treated. Not to mention that moving around copies of the dataset itself is itself making copies that ARE identical…

DALL-E image of Mickey Mouse: https://openart.ai/discovery/generation-arxwmypmw7v5zpxeik1y...

It's a research activity.

Google and Meta and Microsoft all have research teams working on AI.

Putting out papers like this helps keep their existing employees happy (since they get to take credit for their work) and helps attract other skilled employees as well.

Yep. The people who build Imagen are researchers, not engineers, and these announcements are accompanied by papers describing the results as a means of sharing ideas/results with the academic community. Pretty weird to me how so many in this thread don't seem to remember that.

Why post? to show methods and their capabilities. Also flex.

What will they do with model? figure out how to prevent abuse and incorporate into future Google Assistant, Photos and AR offerings.

Just fixing their basic stuff would be a better start from where they are right now.

Indeed, it's almost just a flex? "Oh yeah, we can do better! No, no one can use it, ever."

Even just giving out high quality research papers helps a lot, so it's still great thing that they published it.

The big tech companies are competing for AI mindshare. In 10 years, which company's name will be synonymous with AI? That's being decided right now.

Likely to show to shareholders that they're keeping up with trends and competitors

They're going to 1) rent it out as a paid API and/or 2) let you use it to create ads on Google platforms like YouTube, perhaps customized to the individual user

Ask the "AI Ethicists". They have to justify their salaries in some way or another.

Or maybe Google is using "Responsible AI" as an excuse to minimize competitors when they release their own Imagen Video as a Service API in Google Cloud.

It's quite strange when the "ethical" thing to do is to not publicly release your research, put it behind a highly restrictive API and charge a high price for it ($0.02 per 1k tokens for Davinci for ex.)

This, 100%

The word "ethics" has become very flexible...

This doesn’t really prevent competition though, the research paper is enough to recreate it. It does make recreation more expensive, but maybe that leaves you with a motivation to get paid for doing it.