Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models • Hacker News Board

Re: Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

#351

Post by kranke155 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 2:21 AM UTC

inerte wrote: post #93

kranke155 wrote: post #15

I’m going to post an Ask HN about what am I supposed to do when I’m “disrupted”. I work in film / video / CG where the bread and butter is short form advertising for Youtube, Instagram and TV. It’s painfully obvious that in 1 year the job might be exceedingly more difficult than it is now.

It depends where you are in the industry. If you're on the creative, storyboard, come up with ideas and marketing side, you will be fine. If you're in actual production, booking sets, unfolding stairs to tape infinite background, picking up the best looking fruits in the grocery store... yeah, not looking good. Go up in the value chain and learn marketing, how to tell stories, etc... you don't want to be approached b…

Absolutely that is my plan. But I fear for my colleagues in other areas. A lot of them are not seeing the (now clearly) exponential improvement curve and they wouldn’t even take this discussion seriously.

They’ll just throw it away off hand. But I’ve run my own business and I know what the pressures are. A lot of people working today will not be working in 10 years in my industry, period.

Re: Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

#352

Post by needle0 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 2:28 AM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #341

atty wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you misunderstood my post. (Or I have misunderstood yours) I was not arguing that the models should not be released. I was pointing out that the statement that no harm has been done with them was false, and that even though that is the case it is probably better for society, on the whole, for them to be open. We can both admit that the tools can and will be used for bad purposes, and come to the conclusion…

Given OpenAI’s extreme restrictions on Dalle 2, can anybody point to any harm that has been done with Stable Diffusion in particular since it launched? Even a single instance. Because I have only seen strictly positive coverage of people having fun with it.

Personally I am strongly on the opinion of favoring openness, but since you asked, there was this: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/xofxo3/a_j...

The hoax was pretty quickly debunked, as the attempt was pretty crude. The images were full of artifacts and the image sizes were all 512x512 squares (the default image size for Stable Diffusion) with no attempt made to crop it to more common aspect ratios. So in terms of harm "done" I guess it was pretty minor, but I'm still leaving it out here since it made big enough of a commotion to make it to nationwide news stories.

Re: Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

#353

Post by alphabetting » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 2:36 AM UTC

infoseek12 wrote: post #348

i_like_apis wrote: post #261

The concern trolling and gatekeeping about social justice issues coming from the so-called "ethicists" in the AI peanut gallery has been utterly ridiculous. Google claims they don't want to release Imagen because it lacks what can only be called "latent space affirmative action". Stability or someone like it will valiantly release this technology, again and there will be absolutely no harm to anyone. Stop being so to…

Google has done incredible work on basic machine learning research that has enabled other individuals and organizations to do amazing things. In terms of actually implementing new machine learning technology, they've pretty much hobbled themselves to the point of irrelevance. In some ways, it may be for the best that they've ensured that the future of machine learning will be written primarily by those who hold oppos…

My sense has been that Google and Deepmind ML has been pretty ingrained across the board in Google services. If they're still producing the the most advanced AI research, I don't see why that wouldn't be introduced into future products as well.

Re: Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

#354

Post by zhynn » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

flycaliguy wrote: post #335

atty wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly suspect you’ve never been on the end of an internet doxxing/hate brigade if you can’t imagine how this could be used to make someone’s life a living hell. I’ll explain again that I think they can be used for bad actions, and also that they should still be released, because the benefits will outweigh the negatives. It does not hurt to admit that some things can be dangerous when used in nefarious ways. No o…

I totally agree. People often argue that photoshop has been around forever and so on. Creating sophisticated pornographic video of any individual is brand new. Creating an app that realistically removes clothing from any photo is new technology. I actually just now came up with an idea for a browser plug-in that removes clothing from every image loaded.

The trolling terrifies me.

Trolling someone by creating awful video (just think about how deeply, photo-realistically, awful it could be - porn is just the tip of the iceberg) is going to get really bad. I am not sure how this is going to shake out. The easiest will be video of famous people doing awful things. A little harder is doing a custom training on a particular person's likeness, and videos of that person doing awful things. That high-schooler. That child. It's not a happy idea. There should be severe consequences for deliberately making something like this with the intent to harass (troll).

The fact is we have not even scratched the surface of classifying trolling as a real crime. I am less concerned with the tech (it's inevitable, hand wringing about it is not useful), and more concerned with the fact that we still have essentially no real consequences to this kind of harassment.

I suspect that strong anonymity is incompatible with civilized life, since the few edgelords will always end up ruining it for the many. We have collectively decided that some amount of privacy must be sacrificed to live in a civilized place where you can address grievance (the subpoena must be served to someone). Surveillance is a weapon for tyranny, but I think that we need to flip the script. The relationship between tyranny and surveillance means we need better governments, not more anonymity.

I also suspect we don't need to change anything except enforcement. I think trolls are a lot less anonymous than they think they are, since their opsec is typically nonexistent. It's just that we have no enforcers, and for some reason don't care. If I had a magic wand, I would convert the DEA wholesale over to dealing with online crimes (trolling, CP, trafficking, etc).

Re: Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

#355

Post by jquery » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

i_like_apis wrote: post #261

The concern trolling and gatekeeping about social justice issues coming from the so-called "ethicists" in the AI peanut gallery has been utterly ridiculous. Google claims they don't want to release Imagen because it lacks what can only be called "latent space affirmative action". Stability or someone like it will valiantly release this technology, again and there will be absolutely no harm to anyone. Stop being so to…

You call it "concern trolling", I call it responsible research. It's not "social justice" to be concerned about the ability of any entity to make propaganda videos for virtually free. "Ok Google, produce a CDC-type public information video about how vaccines cause autism and disability".

Not that I would have a complaint if social justice was the sole thing keeping it from being released. Facebook managed to cause genocides by being careless.

Re: Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

#356

Post by filoleg » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 2:42 AM UTC

schleck8 wrote: post #244

kertoip_1 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it possible that all of them just started to appear at the same time? Is it possible that those models were designed and trained in a last few weeks? Has some "magic key" to content generation been just unexpectedly discovered? Or the topic became trendy and everyone is just publishing what they've got so far, so they hope to benefit from media attention?

This is why https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/xwdzr5/the_num...

As pointed out in the comments of that thread, if you make the same graph of all papers on arXiv by year (instead of just AI+ML), it would look roughly the same.

Which speaks more about the growth of popularity of arXiv or the total number publications, rather than AI+ML specifically.

Re: Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

#357

Post by alphabetting » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 2:44 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #312

atty wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference in ease of use. I could never use photoshop to fake something like that even if I wanted to. Further, we have seen harm come from some of this already, there’s a pretty big online community that uses deepfakes to put people in situations they would rather not be in, the most obvious being porn.

I'm going to take an unpopular position: there's no harm being done. It's not putting people in positions they would rather not be in, but putting their likeness into those situations. It's a key difference: if someone makes a paper mache of a naked Trump to use in a protest, is harm being done to him? The idea that it's "doing harm" is simply inventing a new form of lèse-majesté. Verbally, we regularly do the same:…

Firstly, I think your position is pretty popular given thread.

At your point, I think it's worth considering widespread acceptance of ridiculous ideas that currently exist (amount of people who believe articles from The Onion for example). There's no harm there but when the content is convincing video being used by nefarious actors I think you could make argument potential for harm is real, especially given the media content bubbles on both sides that people have segregated to in social media age.

Re: Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

#358

Post by filoleg » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 2:49 AM UTC

dagmx wrote: post #227

y04nn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about adding this feature to your creative workflow, for fast prototyping. I've played with DALL-E, I'm not able to paint but I was able to generate good looking paintings and it felt amazing, like getting new power, I felt like Neo when he learn martial art in The Matrix. And I realized that AI may be the new bicycle of the mind, like the personal computers and internet changed our way to work, think and live,…

Oh yes definitely they’re great tools in the toolbox. We already use lots of ML powered tooling to speed things up so I have no beef with that. I just don’t agree with the swathes of people saying this replaces artists.

Ditto, thanks for making a great point. You nailed it just right, because I get the exact same feeling with people from other industries asking me if I am worried yet that copilot-like assistants and visual programming tools will make my job obsolete, and then giving me that "welp, at least you are optimistic" look. If anything, all those copilot-like assistant tools will only make me more efficient, and visual programming, well, it's been discussed plenty of times already.

In the near future, for all practical intents and purposes, AI will be just a force multiplier. But a really powerful one.

Re: Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

#359

Post by infoseek12 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:05 AM UTC

alphabetting wrote: post #353

infoseek12 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has done incredible work on basic machine learning research that has enabled other individuals and organizations to do amazing things. In terms of actually implementing new machine learning technology, they've pretty much hobbled themselves to the point of irrelevance. In some ways, it may be for the best that they've ensured that the future of machine learning will be written primarily by those who hold oppos…

My sense has been that Google and Deepmind ML has been pretty ingrained across the board in Google services. If they're still producing the the most advanced AI research, I don't see why that wouldn't be introduced into future products as well.

I'm sure machine learning has already been introduced in one way or another in almost all of Google's services. But the implementations are mostly in the backend and enhancements like better recommendations that don't jump out as incredible leaps in artificial intelligence. They are almost exclusively incremental rather than radical innovations, quantitative and not qualitative improvements.

In terms of machine learning technology that introduces truly novel innovations Google's product portfolio is notable barren. For instance the incredible powerful potential for image generation these new diffusion models open up, who's models will the world use to explore the potential and start using this technology? Google's model with the intense, though imperfect, effort that goes into addressing questions of bias and abuse? Or the model bankrolled by an ex hedge fund manager who probably put a bit less thought into addressing these questions?

Re: Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

#360

Post by gundmc » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:12 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #333

> However, there are several important safety and ethical challenges remaining. Imagen Video and its frozen T5-XXL text encoder were trained on problematic data. While our internal testing suggest much of explicit and violent content can be filtered out, there still exists social biases and stereotypes which are challenging to detect and filter. We have decided not to release the Imagen Video model or its source code…

Speculation, but I think the most straightforward read of that statement is not about preventing this type technology from negatively impacting society broadly (since as you and others pointed out, there are numerous similar actors creating similar systems), but Google doesn't want to the bad publicity or legal risk of problematic outputs of their models. I think they're terrified to be honest.