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Stable Diffusion is a big deal

simonwillison.net

361–370 of 488 posts

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#361

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…

It'd have to get itself into the dataset, as if it was 'Snoop Dogg' or some other identifiable person that the AI can reproduce. The degree to which you can generate stuff that is deepfake 'Elon Musk' doing whatever you say, is the degree to which you can invent a character and have the AI generate images (or video) of it following (sort of) your script and directions.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#362
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you didn't understand my point > took that image from the online shop They didn't take the image. They looked at it and learned a few datapoints from it. It's not like they compressed the image and added it into the model, able to be reversed by anyone who downloads it. In fact it's likely there's other completely distinct images that could have contributed the exact same tweaks to the model, like a has…

> They didn't take the image. They looked at it and learned a few datapoints from it All rights reserved means "all rights" Nobody authorized them to do what they did. > No, but the analogy would be if you learned something from the blurb you read - like a word, or a factoid, or an expression - and it influenced some writing you did later. You didn't steal from that book's author that's what clean room implementation…

This why we have the fair use defense for ignoring copyright [0]. It’s more efficient for society to limit the control copyright allows authors of works so they can be leveraged to enable something even greater. While many in the media community ask permission for almost any use, to maintain good relationship, and limit liability you don’t have to for many uses.

“Copyright” and fair use are human defined not absolutes, so the real debate is whether AI models should be allowed to learn from copyright works like a human does. This use case is also close to people who use clips or samples snippets of works in other bits of art which they then profit off of. It is way more efficient at this process than previous methods (having an artist study and practice a style then reproduce it), so that is where the debate is.

0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#363

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.

I am sorry, I could not parse your comment. Can you explain what it means in simple terms? Thanks.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#364

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.

You're nitpicking one of the given examples without engaging the user on the point they were trying to make.

To be nuanced, maybe they might have said, "cobblers are less in demand now that many people have moved from owning fewer pairs of shoes they make last through repair to owning more pairs of shoes that they tend to get rid of when they are worn out due to changes in construction materials used in production," but if people have to write like that to make points, nobody will ever make a point.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Code has to be 100% correct or else it’s considered a bug (assuming it’s syntactically valid). Code that is 98% correct is actually much worse than no code at all. That’s the kind of code that will introduce subtle, systemic faults, and years later result in catastrophic failure when the company realizes they’ve been calculating millions of payments without sales tax, or a clever hacker discovers they can get escalat…

Won't fix. Working as expected.

That wouldn't be a meme if it was something that doesn't happen

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like a decent way to produce concept sketches. Currently, working with creatives (including programmers) is a very iterative process for non-creatives. "I want this." "No, I meant this." "Can we try making that line longer?" "Eh, I'm not feeling it. Why don't we try brighter colors?" "Ugh. That looks obnoxious. Can we tone down the red?" etc. If the non-creative can use this system to reduce that iteration,…

honestly i feel the opposite. one of the worst situations to run into as a designer is a client who is simply too married to a bad design. i would much rather work with something you scribbled on the back of a napkin than than some highly rendered ai vomit that is just fundamentally shit.

That’s a good point.

Well, the bottle is open, and the genie is flying around, so we’ll have to see what happens…

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#367

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…

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Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#368

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.

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.

you also didn't flip millions of illustrations into a commercial product without paying the creators or rights holders to license them. this is theft plain and simple.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're nitpicking one of the given examples without engaging the user on the point they were trying to make. To be nuanced, maybe they might have said, "cobblers are less in demand now that many people have moved from owning fewer pairs of shoes they make last through repair to owning more pairs of shoes that they tend to get rid of when they are worn out due to changes in construction materials used in production,"…

Yes, I nitpicked because OP was speaking in absolutes. The larger point that “technology destroys jobs” is not novel or interesting.

But to know that these jobs still exist, and might be more common than you realize, now that’s interesting!

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many of your prompts have trouble getting the right representation because you're using a lot of abstract and implied language. For these prompts to work right, you need to be very specific and often add keywords as if you're specifying a mood board. You also need some overlap between what the model has likely been trained on and the expected output. The system works much better in img2img mode. Slapping toge…

>You also need some overlap between what the model has likely been trained on and the expected output. Ooooo. Ouch. That's... Kind of a death knell for a good tool in my experience, and suggests the tool in question is a glorified search engine in a sense. With a really confusing query syntax composed of words, and graphical starting states. If I have to become to get anything done... Why not just learn to draw/hire…

Learning to paint hyper realistic paintings is something that takes years if not decades of hard work. Learning how to formulate your queries in a way that the algorithm outputs what you want takes days at worst.

If you want something unique and abstract, you're going to need to go through a lot of trial and error to get what you want. That's still a lot easier than teaching yourself how to create such art.

"Graphical starting states" in this instance isn't as hard, a very rough MS Paint picture of the general shapes you want things to appear in is enough. Alternatively you can grab rough cutouts from stock art, position them right, and the algorithm should figure out how to turn it into a single, flowing picture.

Take a look at these examples (https://huggingface.co/spaces/huggingface/diffuse-the-rest/d...), they're far from perfect but the autocompletion is done quite well. It should be noted that the demo application doesn't expose a lot of the flexibility the underlying model provides (like blend strength and such) but I don't know a free online alternative that does.

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