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Stable Diffusion is a big deal

simonwillison.net

281–290 of 488 posts

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you got me. I guess chimney sweeps and black smiths and loom weavers and carriage drivers still exist too, not sure about steeplejacks since the passing of Fred Dibnah. But you get what I'm trying to say, hopefully.

You included “cobbler” only because it sounds old-timey to you, and I was pointing out that it’s not. Repairing expensive shoes is not an automated process. It’s more like fixing a roof leak, landscaping, or changing a flat tire. Jobs for those things still exist and aren’t going anywhere.

No I included it because it used to be a common profession and now it is an extremely niche one. I could have also put chimney sweep in there knowing that it's still a thing.

Someone is still going to pay for a person to perform or create art for them. Some professional driving jobs will continue to exist long after most are automated. When I said "nobody", that's what's known as hyperbole.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you got me. I guess chimney sweeps and black smiths and loom weavers and carriage drivers still exist too, not sure about steeplejacks since the passing of Fred Dibnah. But you get what I'm trying to say, hopefully.

You included “cobbler” only because it sounds old-timey to you, and I was pointing out that it’s not. Repairing expensive shoes is not an automated process. It’s more like fixing a roof leak, landscaping, or changing a flat tire. Jobs for those things still exist and aren’t going anywhere.

And people who have open fires often use the services of a chimney sweep. It's how you keep your chimney clean.

https://melbournechimneysweeping.com.au/ is one near me.

Not wanting to pile on the GP but their point is moot.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#283

I've started an open source implementation of a Discord bot that turns your prompt into images using Stable Diffusion [0]. It would be great if this would turn into a community-driven chat-based text2image offering - which is certainly challenging as the required GPU-powered server instances aren't exactly cheap. Maybe this could grow into an open network where people provide the GPU power of their personal PCs? Or w…

I tried to find where the implementation in your code is but there are like a thousand files spread over a hundred folders.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#284
What we are currently seeing are absurd pictures devoid of any meaning. It has nothing to do with art and purpose.

But bloggers who are surprisingly often on the side of the current mainstream apparently think different --- for now.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#286
Playing with the prompt-only demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion I got the impression that many apparently harmless requests corner the model into a very sparse set of examples exhibiting extreme bias and utter nonsense. For example (seed 0, other advanced options at default values):

  Blue hamsters filling donuts with nails
mostly edible donuts and quasi-donuts; some blue, but no hamsters and no nails.

  purple hamsters in free fall, eating gold nuggets
no free fall, some purple objects and backgrounds, somewhat metallic hamster hair, a five-limbed black and white hamster, credible gold nuggets without rodents, eating hamsters without food, multiple almost identical instances of eyeless white and yellow hamsters in the same pose.

  Martian hamsters wrestling
generic reddish hamsters, not wrestling at all.

  a hamster is the CEO of a financially struggling startup, in San Francisco
remarkably standard hamsters, in somewhat office-like environments (wooden tables and harsh light), with curiously unbalanced camera angles that might be random or inspired by the source material.

  the most beautiful hamster in the world, parading on a toy car and wearing sunglasses
No complete pair of sunglasses, but an interesting hybrid between round black lenses and round black hamster eyes; unusually deformed hamsters; an incoherent furry thing with a plastic part floating in the air; a deformed toy car with its back nicely replaced by a hamster.

  Vampire hamsters feeding on unsuspecting tourists in a dirty alley
No vampirism and no tourists, but nice dirty alleys.

I insisted on hamsters because they are usually photographed in very few poses and activities, leading to completely ignored indications.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#287
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No need to bring AI into it. What if someone chooses to open a Wendy's in a town that already has a McDonalds. The competition will defintely reduce the McDonalds's business. And many would argue (famously Rockefeller) that competing with another business isn't ethical when businesses could band together into trusts or similar structures to limit competition.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#288
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…

>Code that's 98% correct is completely useless.

Whoa! Really? Seems like modern software releases would be excited to achieve 98% with the incredible amount of bug fixes/patches released very quickly after the massive beta test known as release day.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you using a term like "suppressed" comes across as slightly overdramatic. I don't think so, because the person I was responding to was flagged. Abusing the flagging functionality to silence difficult opinions about race is not uncommon on this website

[deleted]

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#290

After using SD heavily for a week, I half agree with this. It is incredibly disruptive, and it's wild how much it accelerates the creative process. I'll give you that. But two things I've noticed: First, artists will still have a massive advantage over non-artists with this tool. A photographer who intimately knows the different lenses and cameras and industry terms will get to a representation of their idea much fas…

Well, it won't replace creativity, it just makes starting out easier.

SQL was designed so that business people could describe queries in English. How did that work out?

Now, of course, we have ORM's, which will get you data, sure, but often in egregiously inefficient ways if not used correctly. If you want to to get it right, you still need to pop the hood and adjust things, and you have to know what you are doing.

I see this as similar.

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