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…
I think if you are Google, you are terrified of the bad PR from someone generating something questionable. And that bad article is inevitable if you open up these models. (See, pornpen.ai being released approximately five minutes after StableDiffusion. Imagine the press if that was built from the mode Google published.)
An open source community is a diffuse target, so the NYT won’t go after them as quickly, and let's be honest, their axe to grind is with big tech, not a bunch of AI hackers.