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Stable Diffusion is a big deal

simonwillison.net

221–230 of 488 posts

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#221

Are there any standards/frameworks emerging on how to write texts/prompts?

Not sure what you mean by "standards/frameworks". It's an art rather than a science. Some of the tips passed around smack somewhat of cargo-culting, some genuinely make a difference. Everyone has their own approach and some techniques work for one topic but not others.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#222

I'm not really sure I know how to use these tools. I tried the following prompt: "elon musk giving donald trump a massage using pizza sauce instead of oil, in a majestic room filled with flowers and golden toilets" ...and the result was a crappy AI-generated picture of not-quite donald trump holding a terrible rendering of a pizza, and some hands sticking out of random places. There were some red flowers in the pictu…

It's only good at prompts that ask it to do a non-photorealistic artistic style. All the photorealistic attempts are bad.

> All the photorealistic attempts are bad.

I wish people would stop exaggerating or making statements without some insight behind them.

I've seen hundreds, if not thousands of photorealistic result that range from acceptable to remarkably good.

One example it took seconds to find:

https://lexica.art/prompt/3fbc30ee-ca0f-42f6-8ea5-6890d469ab...

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#223
post #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.

> If they suffer from these copies (morally, financially, spiritually, etc) without a way to offset it, then it is not ethical.

So since automated driving will result in financial suffering to those working in trucking and Uber and whatnot, automating driving is not ethical?

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#224

I'm not really sure I know how to use these tools. I tried the following prompt: "elon musk giving donald trump a massage using pizza sauce instead of oil, in a majestic room filled with flowers and golden toilets" ...and the result was a crappy AI-generated picture of not-quite donald trump holding a terrible rendering of a pizza, and some hands sticking out of random places. There were some red flowers in the pictu…

See my other comment.

> [...] It takes a while to get a feel for what prompts work and how to phrase things. I suggest browsing https://lexica.art/ and using some prompts from there as a template.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#225
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.

Two objections:

1: you cannot produce thousands of detailed pictures in a day, this program can. The argument gets pretty clear if you transpose it to other objects, ie why is it fair to ride a bicycle in the sidewalk but not drive a car?

2: copyright laws. You may not see a picture and imitate it. How do you know this AI didn't just imitate one of the million pictures it saw? And if you distribute it and the author wants to sue, who should it sue? The author of the AI or the person who prompted it?

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the best people to create new art from models like this would be artists themselves? Wouldn't this create more jobs for artists? It's just a different tool

That depends on how easy it is to use the new tools. Getting higher level languages and various libraries/frameworks didn't make coders obsolete, because there was still tons of work to do at a "higher level" that required algorithmic/engineering-style thinking. Yes, previously difficult tasks got a lot easier, but that just meant that even more ambitious projects could be tackled, and that was useful. In contrast, i…

Is the same not true for programming? There's a lot of non-programmers that create programs in Excel, or use no code solutions. A relative newbie can still get a Wordpress website up and running, you only need professional SWEs for the heavy duty stuff.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#227
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.

Now let's have a real oil on canvas hard copy painting of that digitally generated image please?

SD is limited to only digital art first of all, so let's not get too over-excited and hyped around this tool just yet.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#228
post #22

Quoted post unavailable.

Pretty much any ethical discussion about race is suppressed on HN because this is a “Silicon Valley neo rationalist” site Liam Kofi Bright outlines this with the Represser archetype in his new essay “White Psychodrama”

You are exaggerating. HN is fairly broad in it's politics and there's often quite challenging discussions around topics related to diversity. Whilst there is a tendency towards "Silicon Valley neo rationalist" and other voices are sometimes in the minority, you using a term like "suppressed" comes across as slightly overdramatic.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#229
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mate…

As a new user of copilot for the last three months, I can't disagree more. I was initially skeptical, and I have noticed it often produces code that looks good but is wrong. However, it still saves me enough time each day to pay for the monthly subscription - in one day. That's a 30x ROI. I imagine it only gets better from here. I wont go back to programming without it.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#230

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?

Someone will create some AI that detects if the image contains stuff from their copyrighted portfolio
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