101–110 of 140 posts
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Not just Forbes. Read about him on Wikipedia.
>However, according to him, he did not attend his graduation ceremony to receive his degrees, and therefore, he does not technically possess a BA or an MA. Oh wow, he's probably lying about his education.
Stability always seemed like a dark horse thanks to the reputation of their founder and their open source business model. I do get some schadenfreude from seeing them like this considering the damage many feel they've done to the art community. E: -4 in 10 minutes. Stay classy hackernews. I hope this company and OpenAI choke on the algorithmic disgorgement when the law catches up.
SD3.0 looks really good and will probably displace a lot of closed image generation models once it's out. I don't understand why Stability gets so little support from the community. They released the first usable open-source models and their models are the foundation of the most interesting AI-bashing workflows out there - VC funded or otherwise.
Stability AI had massive support when Stable Diffusion 1.x and SDXL each hit the scene. But the Gen AI industry has evolved so rapidly that forks and iterations on the models outpaced them, especially commercially. That's a feature of open-source development, not a bug. But it's a reason (along with the general financial issues which are the company's fault alone) why Stability is switching to a "need a membership to…
Which means, there is nothing with even remotely the same fine tuning ecosystem.
And for that - stability is way ahead of the competition.
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>The entire AI industry is powered by piracy at a massive scale. ARRRRR.. This is a grey area still for me. It's a neural network. It works similar to our brains work, but more consistent. It's doesn't seem like piracy to me. If an artist was really into Salvidor Dali, and happened to imitate his surrealist style, it would not be considered piracy. In fact, this is how art has evolved over the centuries. Each relevan…
> It's a neural network. It works similar to our brains work, but more consistent. Irrelevant and incorrect. > It's doesn't seem like piracy to me. It's pretty indisputably piracy, whether or not it's legal/fair use/whatever. Many of the training sets included material like the books3 corpus which was downloaded to a server somewhere. That is simply piracy, doesn't matter why they downloaded it. I believe many artist…
Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'indisputably' that I wasn't previously aware of.
> I believe many artists rightly refuse to accept this threat to their livelihoods because it was built on their labor.
This model is trained from scratch using only public domain/CC0 and copyright images with specific permission for use: https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one
Does it change anything?
If all the other models were deleted, and this was the only one left, and all future models also had to be similarly licensed, would it change even one single point?
Even if it was the only remaining model and this kind of licensing a requirement for all future work, artists would still be automated out of their highly skilled yet poorly paid profession. It still sucks. There's still no nice way to convey that.
> You built a commercial product on unlicensed data. Do you actually think the law is going to agree that that's fair use?
What do you think the Google search engine is, if not a commercial product built on unlicensed data?
The courts go both ways on this specific question with Google depending on the exact details, because nothing in law is as easy or simple as the clear-cut, goodies-vs.-baddies, black-and-white morality play you want this to be.
The fact that Stability AI have not yet been sued out of existence in a simple open-and-shut court case about copyright infringement ought to have demonstrated both this point, and also that the question "is this piracy?" is, in fact, disputable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just Forbes. Read about him on Wikipedia.
>However, according to him, he did not attend his graduation ceremony to receive his degrees, and therefore, he does not technically possess a BA or an MA. Oh wow, he's probably lying about his education.
Every Forbes article should have the warning that they are not real publication anymore. Everything they publish is written with an intention that you believe an authors opinion as fact. The model for Stability ends in a likely way, they will be swallowed up in a payday. We have recent examples of this. For now, they’re the most open area in a garden of closing gates. And I wish them all the best.
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Does this actually happen at large scale without the permission of the owner of the IP? I can see someone making a few hundred bucks with their fan art, but doing tens of thousands of dollars of business is a different story. The main commercial factor (per the courts - see the recent Warhol lawsuit) is whether the derivative work competes in the market with the original work. I sincerely doubt that even if there is…
> Does this actually happen at large scale Yes? Go to any convention center. Go commission a piece of art on the internet. It is almost all infringing "fan art". > I can see someone making a few hundred bucks with their fan art Its not some rando person doing this stuff for a hobby. Instead, I am talking about the entire industry. All you'd have to do is go to any gaming/media/comic convention and this is immediately…
Most of the gaming/media/comic conventions I have been to have involved game/media/comic artists selling their own work, not people selling fan art. In fact, the presence of the original artists selling copies of their original works is generally a big draw for the convention. Maybe we go to different conventions or something (I have never been to an anime convention - so maybe that's what you're referring to). The little third-party art I have seen at these conventions is sold with the explicit permission of the original artist/IP holder. So no, it is not "obvious" to me, as someone who has actually gone to a few gaming/comic conventions before, that fan art is a huge industry or that it undercuts demand for the original art.
The fan art I have seen is generally drawn by (professional/high-end amateur) artists for free on deviantart because they like the characters or want to practice their skills.
Also, nobody is currently suing (or particularly upset) over people making art on their home PCs. People are suing over companies selling AI art generators for $billions that directly compete with the artists and stock photo libraries that were used to train these art generators.
Every Forbes article should have the warning that they are not real publication anymore. Everything they publish is written with an intention that you believe an authors opinion as fact. The model for Stability ends in a likely way, they will be swallowed up in a payday. We have recent examples of this. For now, they’re the most open area in a garden of closing gates. And I wish them all the best.
Yup, that’s why the HN code shows the username after the domain now, same as Twitter users.
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Personally I think framing this as some kind of double-standard regarding copyright or even a copyright-specific issue misses the forest for the trees. The problem I see is that the generative AI economy hinges on an injustice: the presumption that all art on the internet - no matter the medium, or means or relative notoriety of the artist - shall be candidate training data, and no burden of attribution whatsoever sh…
>no matter the medium, or means or relative notoriety of the artist - shall be candidate training data Why is this a special case? When people were viewing it, reposting it, using it to learn... those were all accepted uses. Passing it off as your own wasn't allowed, but outright plagiarism has pretty consistently been unaccepted. The problem seems to stim from using it in a way that directly competes with the artist…
Proponents of the current economic model like to frame the artist rejection of AI as an obvious case of Luddism. Of course the artists reject this, it threatens their economic station! And: it's not even wrong.
But, it is a high modernist foible: at some point the raw resource is fully exploited and the wave of companies that rode high on its vast-but-unrenewable quantity will reckon with reality. Their businesses are unsustainable (who could have foreseen it!).
In the mean time, artists won't disappear. Most likely what will happen is that they will continue to subsist - they are essential in this economic loop, whether fairly compensated for their labor or not - but with an even lower economic posture than before.
I don't think there is a moral crisis here, but an economic one. Incidentally, an injustice is perpetrated upon an entire class of laborers. I'll leave it to others to decide the morality of that, considering all the trade-offs.
> It’s a dramatic exodus that comes less than 18 months after Stability’s 2022 fundraise that valued the company at $1 billion. Now, the company is facing a cash crunch, with spending on wages and compute power far outstripping revenue, according to documents seen by Forbes. Bloomberg earlier reported that the company was spending $8 million a month. In November 2023, CEO Emad Mostaque tweeted that the company had generated $1.2 million in revenue in August, and would make $3 million in November. The tweet was later deleted.
This sounds a lot like the two-year period leading up to the dot com crash. Insane valuations and no revenue model. Meanwhile those insanely-valued companies bought Sun Microsystems servers like there was no tomorrow. When the games ended, a lot of those insanely-valued companies went to zero and left a massive overhang of Sun hardware in their wake. Sun began its long nosedive not long after that.