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Stable Diffusion is a big deal

simonwillison.net

201–210 of 488 posts

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://supernotes-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/direct-uploads...

what did you have to write to get it to do this?

> a prisoner trapped inside of a giant lightbulb, banging on the walls, no hope of escape, all hope is lost, gritty, extreme detail

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They absolutely do. What they don’t do is mechanistically clone compressed mathematical representations of input data. The human part of the creative process could very well be a distinguishing feature, legally.

It will be hard to tell whether an image was created by a “human creative process” or AI. Will the same image be legal if a human made it but not if it was created by Stable Diffusion? How will someone even know, short of a legal discovery process?

I wouldn’t be too surprised if tools are created to quantify the amount of a source image that’s gone into an output image.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#203
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every tool, a better output will always be created by people who specialize in a craft. Just as photoshop revolutionized photography, to this day you can tell the difference easily between and bad 'shops. In video games upon release everyone is bad and its an even playing field. But as people practice and gain experience they improve their usage, refine their approaches. You eventually see metas develop and best…

Yes, but art school just turned into a one-semester course.

Of course not, it just gained a new "advanced stable diffusion usage" track. Photography didn't displace painting from art school, and even outside art there are plenty of examples to be found. CNC machines are awesome, but every machining class in existence still teaches manual lathing and milling.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#204
post #43
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every tool, a better output will always be created by people who specialize in a craft. Just as photoshop revolutionized photography, to this day you can tell the difference easily between and bad 'shops. In video games upon release everyone is bad and its an even playing field. But as people practice and gain experience they improve their usage, refine their approaches. You eventually see metas develop and best…

Have we seen similar behavior in the usage of older GPT-3 based tools, for example in copywriting or using Copilot? How's the story there?

There's one huge difference between Copilot and stuff like this. Art that's 98% correct is awesome. Code that's 98% correct is completely useless.

I think Copilot is going to live off hype for a while then tank and be looked back on as a failed experiment. Whereas I think that this kind of AI will eventually get to a point where it's extremely useful and could change up certain industries (game assets, marketing materials etc).

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#205

Regarding the ethics. Thought experiment: I look at a copyrighted image, get inspiration, and then draw a new image (which is not the same as the copyrighted image). Is that ethical? But if I do this millions of times, after looking at millions of copyrighted images, is it still ethical (as long as I don't recreated copyrighted images)? Tough questions!

In my opinion it’s just a technical side of ethics, which has much less value than the main side: what it does to an author. If they suffer from these copies (morally, financially, spiritually, etc) without a way to offset it, then it is not ethical.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#206
post #175

> Stable Diffusion has been trained on millions of copyrighted images scraped from the web. My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material. Every book I read, every tv show I watch, the toys I played with as a child. It's hard to imagine that I could come up with anything that is not inspired by copyrighted work.

I would assume that the point is that you had to pay - in one way or another - for access to this material, which is the intention when it is published and shared. You bought your books, your toys, your TV shows (through ads). SD, by scraping the web, gets all the benefits of prior work without necessarily having adequately compensated the work's creators.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you forbid it, the investment in developing those models disappears. They will be stuck at ~what we have now at best. You can also require cloud providers to enforce a ban on training (and deploying) such models, it's doable. Good luck training it in your basement, it will probably take you a decade. If this is banned, it will become a lot like piracy - yes, it's available, no, most people (at least in the West) d…

If things go that way, the 'legit' models will continue dev, just using licensed content (along with public domain works). It will be more expensive for the end user, but that cost will shrink over time for general work. Tools that mimic working artist though might not be available (or will expensive). This all seems pretty ideal, so the pessimist in me guesses it's fairly unlikely.

I am not sure it will be possible to get enough training data that way.

I don't know enough about diffusion models but if LLMs (of current size) have to use only public domain, they will be undertrained and we will see significant degradation in performance. Not to mention that Codex will be effectively dead.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#208
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every tool, a better output will always be created by people who specialize in a craft. Just as photoshop revolutionized photography, to this day you can tell the difference easily between and bad 'shops. In video games upon release everyone is bad and its an even playing field. But as people practice and gain experience they improve their usage, refine their approaches. You eventually see metas develop and best…

Yes, but art school just turned into a one-semester course.

Nobody gets paid to be a telephone operator or a cobbler or a steeplejack anymore either. If new tools come along that automates and further commoditizes the production of art, I don't see the issue. Automatic driving for trucking, public transport, taxis would economically impact vastly more people, and everyone here seems to be cheering for that.

There's nothing special about art. People will still do it as a hobby, like they do with a lot of other dead trades and professions. In many ways I think the personal aspect of the creation and sharing with people you know is the special thing, rather than the creation or performance of a commercial success (not that I've had any experience with the latter, mind you). And I'm not against the mass consumption of art, just that it needn't be produced by people if it has the same entertainment value then that's great.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#209
post #56

> No-one expected creative AIs to come for the artist jobs first, but here we are! Maybe that's because we never really thought about it. In hindsight, it's only logical. For an artistic rendering, correctness doesn't matter much nor does understanding the model. For flying a plane or driving a car or just transforming code from one language to another, it very much does.

Agreed.

Symbolic AI dominated the field for 50 years: thanks partially to an accident of history (the highly influential work of Minsky, Newell, etc) and partially due to lack of the data needed to try anything else.

Now we’ve seen essentially 50 years of research on data-driven methods compressed into 5. In retrospect it makes sense that applications to which symbolic reasoning is especially ill-suited (including artistic rendering) would be the lowest-hanging fruit.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#210
post #175

> Stable Diffusion has been trained on millions of copyrighted images scraped from the web. My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material. Every book I read, every tv show I watch, the toys I played with as a child. It's hard to imagine that I could come up with anything that is not inspired by copyrighted work.

I would assume that the point is that you had to pay - in one way or another - for access to this material, which is the intention when it is published and shared. You bought your books, your toys, your TV shows (through ads). SD, by scraping the web, gets all the benefits of prior work without necessarily having adequately compensated the work's creators.

I'm pretty sure I didn't buy any of the images I view while browsing the web.

Sending me ads doesn't constitute a transaction, besides I usually don't choose to look at them anyway.

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