Re:SDXL Turbo: A Real-Time Text-to-Image Generation Model
by godelski on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @03:15PM
(#38464654)
> I'm disgusted, but not surprised, that teenage kids are generating CSAM like this. Even before we had diffusion models, we had GANs and deepfakes, which were almost immediately used for generating shittons of nonconsensual porn
I think the big difference now is that 1) it's much easier to do now, and 2) the computational requirements and (more importantly) technical skills have dramatically dropped.
We should also be explicitly aware that deep fakes are still new. GANs in 2014 were not creating high definition images. They were doing fuzzy black and white 28x28 faces, poorly, and 32x32 color images that if you squint hard enough you could see a dog (https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661). MNIST was a hard problem at that time and that's 10 years. It took another 4 years to get realistic faces and objects (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10196) (mind you, those images are not random samples), another year to get to high resolution, and another 2 to get to diffusion and another 2 before those exploded. Deep fakes were really only a thing within the last 5 years and certainly not on consumer hardware. I don't think the legal system moves much in 10 years let alone 5 or 2. I think a lot of us have not accurately encoded how quickly this whole space has changed. (image synthesis is my research area btw)
I'm not surprised that these teenagers in a small town did this. But the fact that all those adjectives exist in that order is distinct. Discussions of deep fakes like that Tom Scott video were barely a warning (5 years is not a long time). It quickly went from researchers thinking it can happen in the next decade and starting discussions to real world examples making the news in under their prediction time (I don't think anyone expected how much money and man hours would be dumped into AI).
I think the big difference now is that 1) it's much easier to do now, and 2) the computational requirements and (more importantly) technical skills have dramatically dropped.
We should also be explicitly aware that deep fakes are still new. GANs in 2014 were not creating high definition images. They were doing fuzzy black and white 28x28 faces, poorly, and 32x32 color images that if you squint hard enough you could see a dog (https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661). MNIST was a hard problem at that time and that's 10 years. It took another 4 years to get realistic faces and objects (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10196) (mind you, those images are not random samples), another year to get to high resolution, and another 2 to get to diffusion and another 2 before those exploded. Deep fakes were really only a thing within the last 5 years and certainly not on consumer hardware. I don't think the legal system moves much in 10 years let alone 5 or 2. I think a lot of us have not accurately encoded how quickly this whole space has changed. (image synthesis is my research area btw)
I'm not surprised that these teenagers in a small town did this. But the fact that all those adjectives exist in that order is distinct. Discussions of deep fakes like that Tom Scott video were barely a warning (5 years is not a long time). It quickly went from researchers thinking it can happen in the next decade and starting discussions to real world examples making the news in under their prediction time (I don't think anyone expected how much money and man hours would be dumped into AI).