Implementation of Imagen, Google's text-to-image neural network, in PyTorch • Hacker News Board

Re: Implementation of Imagen, Google's text-to-image neural network, in PyTorch

#121

Post by webmaven » Sat, May 28, 2022, 3:20 AM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #105

dotnet00 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was writing up a whole explanation for how that couldn't possibly work, but tbh you aren't really wrong with that, after all captchas these days do similar work. I guess the primary concern with a porn model would be the ethics of it, which might turn off any company from helping out on training resources (for example, Google's TPU Research Cloud requires you to follow their code of ethics on AI, which would be ver…

Sincerely asking: why is this an issue of ethics? What about algorithmically generating porn would be unethical?

> Sincerely asking: why is this an issue of ethics? What about algorithmically generating porn would be unethical?

There are several potential ways:

The training data may come from unethical sources or processes.

The result may be degrading or demeaning to people who share characteristics with the virtual people depicted (gender, race, etc.)

Increasing the supply may increase the demand, exacerbating the previous issue.

The technology could be trivially repurposed to produce content that is entirely illegal.

Re: Implementation of Imagen, Google's text-to-image neural network, in PyTorch

#122

Post by fft_fan » Sat, May 28, 2022, 6:08 PM UTC

webmaven wrote: post #121

fluoridation wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sincerely asking: why is this an issue of ethics? What about algorithmically generating porn would be unethical?

> Sincerely asking: why is this an issue of ethics? What about algorithmically generating porn would be unethical? There are several potential ways: The training data may come from unethical sources or processes. The result may be degrading or demeaning to people who share characteristics with the virtual people depicted (gender, race, etc.) Increasing the supply may increase the demand, exacerbating the previous iss…

> The training data may come from unethical sources or processes.

That is an oft-overlooked point. In this instance, I think many forget how exploitative pornography actually is. And sex work in general.

Re: Implementation of Imagen, Google's text-to-image neural network, in PyTorch

#123

Post by webmaven » Sun, May 29, 2022, 7:35 AM UTC

fft_fan wrote: post #122

webmaven wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sincerely asking: why is this an issue of ethics? What about algorithmically generating porn would be unethical? There are several potential ways: The training data may come from unethical sources or processes. The result may be degrading or demeaning to people who share characteristics with the virtual people depicted (gender, race, etc.) Increasing the supply may increase the demand, exacerbating the previous iss…

> The training data may come from unethical sources or processes. That is an oft-overlooked point. In this instance, I think many forget how exploitative pornography actually is. And sex work in general.

I'm not someone who thinks sex work is inherently exploitative, but in practice it usually is, and many of the efforts to stamp it out just exacerbate the power imbalances that lead to exploitation.

We're seeing a lot of garden variety capitalist exploitation happening with ordinary mainstream training data production and labeling work, so I would expect anything adult-adjacent to be correspondingly worse, even though it doesn't have to be.