The thing about owning the data sets and the huge TPU/A100 clusters is that the “publish the papers” model strictly serves them: no one can implement their models, they can implement everyone else’s.
I do understand the fear of being sued or targeted in the media over misuse, though. The person misusing technology should (obviously imo) be held responsible for that, but since it's new tech, the tech will be taking the blame for the first really controversial cases of disinfo and/or harassment that utilize it.
Something tells me these pricks will end up arguing for a reversion to thin-client compute. It is in their financial interest too after all.
Funny coincidence!
I can already see it. Just think of all the energy wasted training AI at home! I can imagine police drones with IR sensors scanning the cities for the heat signatures of illegal AI "farms".
Talking seriously, however they try to spin it, advanced AI (same as every other big scientific/engineering achievement) will be predominantly good. So let's say there is time when AI can create convincing videos of people engaging in various compromising "activities". When this becomes widespread it will give plausible deniability to any potential victim of such attack(with real or deep faked materials) .
In a world where any compromising video or picture can be made with anyone, the value of such materials for wannabee blackmailer diminishes rapidly. However, in a world where there is only few entities that can produce such materials and they do so sparingly those entities get a tool that gives them huge power (especially in democracies where popular opinion decides who governs).
They should start teaching the problem of induction in schools, evidently it's needed.
How about you present a counterargument - why would advanced AI be predominantly bad? Unless, of course, your only counterargument is the classic philosophical statement of "we can't know nuffin".
A bunch of arguments about why AI would be bad have already been advanced. For the economic one, refer to Martin Ford. For the existential one, refer to Bostrom.
No.
Either discuss this with me or don't. Don't summon your sacred scrolls to do the arguing for you.
> It is a logical fallacy
Instead of just parroting my stance in response, I'll try to elaborate some more. Please either follow my example or don't reply to me at all.
Logic itself cannot bring you knowledge about the world, as the concept of apriori knowledge is crackpipe bullshit. All knowledge is based on induction, even your knowledge that induction is fallible. Saying induction is a "logical fallacy" doesn't even make sense, since the purpose of induction is not to perform logical operations.
I'll do whatever I want, especially when "communicating" (generous verb) with someone capable of writing the epitome of stupidity "the concept of apriori knowledge is crackpipe bullshit".
What a juvenile attitude. I wasn't giving you orders, I was presenting my standards of communication. You can do whatever the hell you want, but don't expect other people to tolerate your obnoxiousness.
You seem to get off on insulting people. I do not get off on being insulted, so I will refrain from further communication with you. Goodbye.
Basically no one who sticks around on here is “dumb”, I don’t know you but I have a Bayesian prior that you’re probably pretty fucking smart, and GP was being a bit of a smartass, C’est la vie.
I completely agree with your game plan of “let’s get a more substantial conversation going here”. It’s the right move.
I think that we probably should, as a society, do a serious audit of the public school system curriculum to see if it still makes sense in light of the insane rate of change in the facts of life over the last century :)
"What have you done this week?"
And the risk behind that is...?
If you drill down with such claims the core is always "someone might use this to lie online" and the proposed solution every single time is: more surveillance. End anonymity. Have a Facebook account required to use the internet. Real name and real face policies for every online interaction.
I’ll explain again that I think they can be used for bad actions, and also that they should still be released, because the benefits will outweigh the negatives. It does not hurt to admit that some things can be dangerous when used in nefarious ways. No one suggests we ban kitchen knives even though they are lethal, because their utility is massive, and outweighs their danger. In much the same way these models have extreme utility, that almost certainly outweighs their potential negatives.
I actually just now came up with an idea for a browser plug-in that removes clothing from every image loaded.
Trolling someone by creating awful video (just think about how deeply, photo-realistically, awful it could be - porn is just the tip of the iceberg) is going to get really bad. I am not sure how this is going to shake out. The easiest will be video of famous people doing awful things. A little harder is doing a custom training on a particular person's likeness, and videos of that person doing awful things. That high-schooler. That child. It's not a happy idea. There should be severe consequences for deliberately making something like this with the intent to harass (troll).
The fact is we have not even scratched the surface of classifying trolling as a real crime. I am less concerned with the tech (it's inevitable, hand wringing about it is not useful), and more concerned with the fact that we still have essentially no real consequences to this kind of harassment.
I suspect that strong anonymity is incompatible with civilized life, since the few edgelords will always end up ruining it for the many. We have collectively decided that some amount of privacy must be sacrificed to live in a civilized place where you can address grievance (the subpoena must be served to someone). Surveillance is a weapon for tyranny, but I think that we need to flip the script. The relationship between tyranny and surveillance means we need better governments, not more anonymity.
I also suspect we don't need to change anything except enforcement. I think trolls are a lot less anonymous than they think they are, since their opsec is typically nonexistent. It's just that we have no enforcers, and for some reason don't care. If I had a magic wand, I would convert the DEA wholesale over to dealing with online crimes (trolling, CP, trafficking, etc).
"Better governments" is not actionable, people have been wanting that since Socratese. Might as well wish for the second coming.
The real answer is to just let people know about the fakery, then they'll stop believing every video and the trolls will be defanged.
They clearly aren't the best arbiters of judgement, so who gets to decide "sever consequences"?
I personally hope it happens as soon as possible. Intellectual property theft (without which those models don't exists) shouldn't be allowed.
Personally I disagree, as the models themselves do not contain any material which can be considered a copyright violation, the value of scraping the open web is easily apparent, the ability to prevent scraping wholesale - even given the legal framework to disallow it - seems dubious, and lastly because the collective potential harm caused by restricting just one or a few of the more arguably more ethical nations from this technology pathway is a known unknown, and possibly a very large one at that.
Yep! Remove clothing and make-up to show everyone as they really are!
You can call it the "ugly truth" plugin.
We may make laws that prohibit online harassment, and that should be the mechanism we use to deal with this. Not through technology bans.
Sounds like you're saying the even without advanced AI, online bullying is already somewhat harmful?
So what exactly is the additional harm of AI?
ROFL what a weird thing for any HN commenter to say
The issue is, as an industry and society, we somehow bought the "safety" and "harm" charade a little bit too much, and somehow think it's a reasonable argument instead of being completely insane.
We can both admit that the tools can and will be used for bad purposes, and come to the conclusion that their benefits outweigh the negatives. We would not be doing any favors to our own arguments by pretending otherwise.
The hoax was pretty quickly debunked, as the attempt was pretty crude. The images were full of artifacts and the image sizes were all 512x512 squares (the default image size for Stable Diffusion) with no attempt made to crop it to more common aspect ratios. So in terms of harm "done" I guess it was pretty minor, but I'm still leaving it out here since it made big enough of a commotion to make it to nationwide news stories.
This has been possible without AI for a very very long time now (just open photoshop, etc). It barely ever happens, and society hasn't collapsed.
I keep seeing this argument come up and it baffles me that informed technologists take it seriously, as if it were impossible to convincingly manipulate images before DALL-E came around.
Further, we have seen harm come from some of this already, there’s a pretty big online community that uses deepfakes to put people in situations they would rather not be in, the most obvious being porn.
You couldn't, but basically any VFX shop easily could. Point is, it doesn't make anything possible that wasn't already possible, it just makes it more accessible. That's an inevitability with technology, as time goes on. The counter is not to try and suppress it, that has never worked and never will.
It's always individuals who want to harm others in this particular way; and individuals don't throw around big-VFX-project amounts of money on petty revenge. But they'd certainly spend $20.
DDoS attacks got a lot (1000x) more commonplace once there were DDoS services that let you buy an hour of attacking someone for $20. Same idea here.
DDoS services are almost always purely malicious (you can _may be_ argue that you can use them for pen-testing or load-testing). But cars are not just purely malicious; there's a lot of useful things cars can do, and that's why the dangers of car ownership is outweighed by the benefits, as judged by society - we just have some road rules, and licenses, so that people know to use them responsibly.
Why not the same with an AI model?
You can download and run this software right now: http://faceswap.dev/ and it will do a better job, and do it on video, then any AI image generator.
The technology is over 3 years old and the world hasn't ended, the harassment hasn't happened. It's so common that your phone runs it for Instagram.
There's this whole narrative here that "this harm is new" and not only is it not new, it's not even better then what we already had.
In your example, the correct parallel isn't killing people in real life, it's making an image of killing people. The ethics of making such images are debatable, but they already permeate our society without AI.
So the problem isn't the AI, it's the forum of haters. Restricting AI usage, in the hope of not having someone use it to incite hate is too roundabout a way to achieve any significant result, while everybody pays a high cost (of not being free to use such an AI as they see fit).
The idea that it's "doing harm" is simply inventing a new form of lèse-majesté. Verbally, we regularly do the same: we might take a signifier for someone and place it in a representation. "Rick likes to fuck goats every day." Have I done harm to Rick?
If I circulated a convincing-looking video of Rick fucking goats to his parents, partner and his boss at the school where he works, that could easily do considerable harm to Rick.
So there seems to be an implicit assumption here that the risk is faked material where people don't believe it's fake, for some reason. And the fix for that would be to ensure that the easy to use versions of generators are watermarking or otherwise recording what they made, so it's easy to find out if something was faked. That doesn't help of course if you're up against a programmer who can make awesome deepfakes locally with open source software and a great GPU but then we're back to the debate about costs because of course, if you to against well funded experts they could already do this sort of thing. In reality it doesn't happen.
It's inevitable and frankly a hundred Ricks is a price worth paying.
For AI image generation to cause harm specifically, the harm has to be consequent to the additional realism.
IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”.
The harm is not the "embarrassment" of seeing someone in the likeness of yourself (or your son, your friend, your partner, etc) doing something shameful. The harm is the fact that people are very likely to believe it is true and it's not a fake obviously edited photo or video.
You can disagree on the seriousness of the harm or risk or danger or whatever but I think the distinction between an obviously silly/embarrassing fake (a puppet, papier mache, badly done photoshop picture) and a realistic convincing deepfake video is pretty obvious. They aren't even in the same ballpark.
> IMO most of the harm from AI is likely to come from people not believing things that are real, and dismissing reality with “that’s just a deepfake”.
This is also a really good point and I agree it's a danger.
See, for instance, this study of "sextortion" in minors:
https://respect.international/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Sex...
At your point, I think it's worth considering widespread acceptance of ridiculous ideas that currently exist (amount of people who believe articles from The Onion for example). There's no harm there but when the content is convincing video being used by nefarious actors I think you could make argument potential for harm is real, especially given the media content bubbles on both sides that people have segregated to in social media age.
Been possible on home computers for 31 years for anyone who actually wants to do it. It literally doesn't matter and I think Stability has proven that the "AI Ethics" part of these models was essentially meaningless busy work at best, and at worse stealing compute credits from users like Dall-E purposefully charging you with something you didn't ask for.
Once every home computer can make the fake images AI Ethicists larp about then the power of fake images disappears because everyone knows not to trust them. It only has power if only a few can make them and never told the world it was even possible.
I am not sure about mass killings. Some say that Facebook enabled a genocide in Myanmar, but I think that is a false hypothesis. It was used as a platform by conflicting parties, sure, but it wasn't the reason for the conflict.
Google has strong governmental ties right now, so opposing any of their messages regardless of content seems sensible. Without backlash it would just fortify the situation right now so it has to be costly for both Google and political parties. Google lost a lot of trust in recent years, sadly that is not true for their market influence. Perhaps they put out these message because government contracts require it, the user wouldn't know because that is not transparent.
It's not what I think, it's what has been proven in the 32 years since photoshop was invented. What killings are you talking about that were caused by the existence of image manipulation?
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45449938
> "A SIM card was about $200 [before the changes]," she says. "In 2013, they opened up access to other telecom companies and the SIM cards dropped to $2. Suddenly it became incredibly accessible."
> "People were immediately buying internet accessible smart phones and they wouldn't leave the shop unless the Facebook app had been downloaded onto their phones," Mearns says. Thet Swei Win believes that because the bulk of the population had little prior internet experience, they were especially vulnerable to propaganda and misinformation.
This means that large amounts of people are not internet-savvy enough to spot fakes and know not to trust them.
Yes, we are. Open source stable diffusion can be trained on any person's images, as long as you have around 20 from different angles. Costs around 50 cents on rented GPUs.
"Ethicists" act like society will somehow not adapt to this tech like they have with all the tech that came before it. I put ethicists in quotes because the arguments they use don't hold up to scrutiny and don't seem to be motivated by real ethical concerns. At least not to me.
But. The Photoshop argument is a bit tiresome. AI will bring about a fundamental shift in content creation and it will disrupt how we treat media as a whole.
Photoshop and other manual technologies are naturally gatekept by the required skill, effort and source images. Once AI media generation matures, all that goes out the window. Anyone will be able to convincingly fake anything with almost no effort and zero traceability.
That shouldn't be downplayed. The concerns are real.
But those aren’t the issues they claim are concerning to them. It’s just stupid identity politics. They want their model to lie to us about the world and say things like everyone is equally likely to any attribute. They have a “reality” problem apparently.
Maybe once it's trivially easy to copy someone else's "likeness", society will finally be able to accept it and evolve past it.
Biological twins have never had control over this. If one twin wants to be a porn star, there's nothing the other can do.
Edit: one could imagine a future dystopia where clones are created to bypass "identity IP".
Yes we are. There have been papers coming out on this tech for years now, with even the south park people doing videos using it.
I think if you are Google, you are terrified of the bad PR from someone generating something questionable. And that bad article is inevitable if you open up these models. (See, pornpen.ai being released approximately five minutes after StableDiffusion. Imagine the press if that was built from the mode Google published.)
An open source community is a diffuse target, so the NYT won’t go after them as quickly, and let's be honest, their axe to grind is with big tech, not a bunch of AI hackers.
They don’t imply any ridiculous idea that such models should or even can be “racially balanced”. But if they want to cover their butts from the possibility of silly controversy, I think that’s cowardly and unnecessary, but at least they could not go out of their way to imply that such controversy should be taken seriously.
3. Why do you use quotes around a something which is your original phrasing? That's pretty disengenious.
4. What's wrong with affirmative action ? It's easy to argue that it has both utilitarian and other moral adventages. I won't claim it is always warranted or the right thing to do, but it definitely not an obvious consensual evil.
It isn’t impermissible for Google to do this, but nobody has to like it, or agree with it.
*for instance, affirmative action is disapproved of by 70-80% of Americans and couldn’t win on a ballot in California in 2020 which is pretty exceptional.
What they want is for results of “software engineer” to be equally likely to show black females. This is not fair to Eskimos and Aboriginals. And what about the mentally handicapped? Is it not unfair that people with Downs Syndrome are not Wall Street stock brokers? How are you going to find all of these “affluent” categories and claim to be able to balance them?
And are you going to claim racism again when to ask for prison inmates and you don’t find any Asians? Should you start putting latent space Asians in latent space prisons?
Because this is a main harp of the social justice “ethicists” - that if you ask these models for “gang member” you get “People Of Color!!” … as if they simply don’t understand the statistics of situation. How would you even “solve” that? Should you decide when and where certain ethnic groups should be taken down a peg?
Latent space affirmative action is technically absurd, an completely ironic as “ethical” behavior.
In terms of machine learning technology that introduces truly novel innovations Google's product portfolio is notable barren. For instance the incredible powerful potential for image generation these new diffusion models open up, who's models will the world use to explore the potential and start using this technology? Google's model with the intense, though imperfect, effort that goes into addressing questions of bias and abuse? Or the model bankrolled by an ex hedge fund manager who probably put a bit less thought into addressing these questions?
Recommendation engines are more responsible than basic infrastructure.
?
There is a world of difference between someone manually seeking out and subscribing to a misinformation source than FB automatically suggesting it to them.
The whole banning spree did more damage to vaccine acceptance than flat earther and lizard people together. It isn't even comparable. Because of course they ended up censoring legitimate criticism and scientific data. That was inevitable, no matter how well intended.
Now they made themselves unreliable because someone on the internet was crazy.
Regardless, though, it is unambiguous that FB's role in "making" problematic UGC is much less direct than Google's role in making Imagen outputs.
And that's for all ML stuff, Colab has lead to a huge democratization of ML, with notebooks setups for basically any cool demo you see out there.
Not that I would have a complaint if social justice was the sole thing keeping it from being released. Facebook managed to cause genocides by being careless.
I don't hold that GPs opinion is wrong, in fact I have no firm views yet on the AI and would generally lean towards stuff being made available even when harmful.
But the idea that people in the field of AI Ethics are all some woke SJW cabal designed to keep Google powerful is for the birds. Like all industry adjacent fields I'm sure there's some corporate capture of research in the field, but maybe, engaging with things in good faith, there are ethical questions about a powerful new technology that can replicate biases in its training data at unprecedented speed and quality?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting)
https://www.stock-analysis-on.net/NASDAQ/Company/Alphabet-In...
Looks like typical MBA craft to me.
It is a matter of PR. It takes a single "problematic" generated content to be framed as "Google is sexist/racist/supports animal abuse", etc.
Statements related to ethics help in a few ways: holding secrets ("oh, we would love to share the models, but we cannot"), protecting against backslash (PR-wise, legal-wise), and PR on its own ("we are that ethical - see! it is even in our mission statement").
Stability or someone like it will valiantly release this technology, again and there will be absolutely no harm to anyone.
Stop being so totally silly Google, OpenAI, et. al. - it's especially disingenuous because the real reason you don't want to release these things is that you can't be bothered to share and would rather keep/monetize the IP. Which is ok -- but at least be honest.