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Stable Diffusion is a big deal

simonwillison.net

311–320 of 488 posts

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#311

Yeah, it is. It is for authors that got their works stolen for "the greater good" without even being notified. A friend of mine found his works in the Stable Diffusion dataset, the work was not meant for public use, he's never been notified and, most of all, he would have never agreed if they cared to ask. https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/im...

I don't think the word "stolen" applies here, at least not any more-so than I stole from him when I looked at that image. I'm not sure about that website rehosting his image, but in terms of the model people are running on their computers, it's not like it literally includes the image that can be pulled back out of it. A computer looked at that image, and tweaked a very small amount of numbers within ~5GB of numbers based on it.

That said, it did get a little better at drawing like your friend from that. But so does every other person who looks at his art. The model however might be better at it than most people. It's a dilemma but it's hard to say any individual image is "stolen"

We kinda already went through this once when GitHub scanned all public codebases to build the model for Copilot. When they did that, Copilot got the ability to program a little more like me (sorry everyone). But when I publicly put my code out there, I was also giving people the opportunity to learn from my code and reproduce similar things to it as well.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, it didn't but people who took only one semester of art classes may remain under the delusion that art is about making pretty pictures. People who need illustration or graphics with no particular style can meet their needs with this tool but that is far from art. This replaces commercial illustration, not artists.

This is first generation tech that is dropping jaws compared to just 2 years ago. A career typically requires 40 years of job security.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#313
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.

This is going to be the legal challenge for the next few years: every year there are lawsuits alleging that music, drawings, etc. are too similar to someone else's work but those take time and require human judgement to decide whether something crosses the line, and the scale which tools like this offer makes that basically as feasible as it was to individually sue Napster users for sharing other people's works.

I'd expect that level of legislative response, and also would bet on lawsuits over any authorized data in their training corpus.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Besides the point that these are freely viewable images anyways, this is also clearly not people's real objection. If you were making a novel-writing ai, it would not placate anybody if you bought a single copy of each book before incorporating it into the model.

> it would not placate anybody if you bought a single copy of each book before incorporating it into the model.

because by buying the book you are not buying the right to distribute derivative works of that book.

I prefer straightforward movie piracy than the "hidden behind a curtain of supposedly artistic value" one.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#315
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.

It isn't coming for the artists' jobs. Commercial illustrators sure. Francis Bacon has a quote that is apt about how he paints the things that cannot be described with words.

A lot of artists work as commercial illustrators. In fact most artists don’t have artist jobs at all cuz there’s no money in it!

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#316
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.

It isn't coming for the artists' jobs. Commercial illustrators sure. Francis Bacon has a quote that is apt about how he paints the things that cannot be described with words.

A lot of artists make a living doing commercial illustration.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#317
This doesn't strictly have to do with stable diffusion, but I really really hope that someone eventually creates a service that hosts live interfaces for all of the legacy image generation models. The turn around on these things is wild, and I worry that unique image generation techniques will become antiquated and forgotten.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#318
post #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.

You... are trying to troll me, right?

    % find . -type f
    ./migrations/Version20220723092633.php
    ./composer.lock
    ./.env.local
    ./bin/connect-to-db.sh
    ./bin/_init.sh
    ./bin/deploy.sh
    ./bin/visualize.sh
    ./bin/console
    ./config/services.yaml
    ./config/bundles.php
    ./config/packages/messenger.yaml
    ./config/packages/framework.yaml
    ./config/packages/doctrine.yaml
    ./config/packages/translation.yaml
    ./config/packages/cache.yaml
    ./config/packages/routing.yaml
    ./config/packages/doctrine_migrations.yaml
    ./config/preload.php
    ./config/routes.yaml
    ./config/routes/framework.yaml
    ./public/index.php
    ./symfony.lock
    ./.env
    ./composer.json
    ./.env.local.dist
    ./src/SymfonyMessageHandler/VisualizeSymfonyMessageHandler.php
    ./src/Command/BotRegister.php
    ./src/Command/BotRun.php
    ./src/SymfonyMessage/VisualizeSymfonyMessage.php
    ./src/Kernel.php

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#319
post #97

I've been trying to get it to draw a picture of a man trapped inside of a light bulb. Can anyone think of a prompt that works? It draws all sorts of freaky things featuring men and light bulbs but none with the former inside the latter.

"a prisoner trapped inside of a giant lightbulb" using Midjourney --test

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/999426920376717513/10...

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#320

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

Whether I agree or not, I have my own thoughts as to why that comment was flagged and it's not because it was "difficult opinion".
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