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Imagen: An AI system that creates photorealistic images from input text

imagen.research.google

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Re: Imagen: An AI system that creates photorealistic images from input text

#41
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Towards the bottom of the page they say: “The potential risks of misuse raise concerns regarding responsible open-sourcing of code and demos. At this time we have decided not to release code or a public demo. In future work we will explore a framework for responsible externalization that balances the value of external auditing with the risks of unrestricted open-access.”

Are they afraid of lawsuits or are they painfully regressive, prude moralists? Stable diffusion was un-neutered within 24 hours of its public release and the worst people do with it is Emma Watson porn.

It's not about prudishness, although generating pornography is one of the concerns. In the paper there's a full page on ethical concerns, but some of issues they mention are misinformation, and perpetuating harmful cultural stereotypes around race and/or gender roles.

Re: Imagen: An AI system that creates photorealistic images from input text

#42
There are some obvious mistakes in tools like this. Such as: Human faces are wrong, writing is usually scrambled, fingers look weird etc... Do you know if we need to have a major breakthrough similar to what happened 6 months ago to fix this or could these be fixed with incremental improvements in current techniques / datasets?

Re: Imagen: An AI system that creates photorealistic images from input text

#44

i only have a passing curiosity in these projects personally. can someone in the field explain why this has exploded recently? there seems to be a lot of these tools released recently (text to image) was there a major breakthrough? a new idea that pushed everyone forward? a recent sharing of talent between groups? edit: just another thought, are they just being posted to HN now, i don't see a date on the page for whe…

Like anyone deeply in a field I know maybe several thousand people who could probably give a better answer, but I figure I'll give an effort to provide one since I don't see any good ones posted yet. The moment everyone knew this was going to be big was in 2019 when StyleGAN came out. They used a lot of tricks like aligning face features (like eyes) and had all their pictures of a single domain (the most famous being…

Is 3d a different problem, or a similar one but considerably harder? I'd expect the data encoding (vertices vs pixels) to change a bit about it but I'm not familiar enough to know.

Re: Imagen: An AI system that creates photorealistic images from input text

#45
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Towards the bottom of the page they say: “The potential risks of misuse raise concerns regarding responsible open-sourcing of code and demos. At this time we have decided not to release code or a public demo. In future work we will explore a framework for responsible externalization that balances the value of external auditing with the risks of unrestricted open-access.”

Are they afraid of lawsuits or are they painfully regressive, prude moralists? Stable diffusion was un-neutered within 24 hours of its public release and the worst people do with it is Emma Watson porn.

Or they just remember Microsoft Tay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

Re: Imagen: An AI system that creates photorealistic images from input text

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous models were either 1. Limited in their capacity to create something that looked very cool, or 2. Gigantic models that needed clusters of GPUs and lots of infrastructure to generate a single image. One major thing that happened recently (2ish weeks ago) was the release of an algorithm (with weights) called stable diffusion, which runs on consumer grade hardware and requires about 8GB of GPU RAM to generat…

Is Lexica finding results previously computed? Or generating them? I could only work with very simple queries like "photo of a cat".

It's just a database of submitted works I think. You can try scrolling down on the opening page to see random prompts and outputs.

Re: Imagen: An AI system that creates photorealistic images from input text

#49

There are some obvious mistakes in tools like this. Such as: Human faces are wrong, writing is usually scrambled, fingers look weird etc... Do you know if we need to have a major breakthrough similar to what happened 6 months ago to fix this or could these be fixed with incremental improvements in current techniques / datasets?

I wouldn't necessarily say a major breakthrough as such but I do think some architectural change is needed. There are concepts in images that we don't rely on purely visual understanding for - like words, we have a language model that we use to rely on when we see text in images. I think we need the same thing in our models to reach the next level of capabilities by combining models across different domains. I don't know if this manifests as pre-training with a language model and then expanding and updating the tensors as part of image training, or some more complicated merger of the models.

To learn logical concepts just from images seems entirely impractical, like we can't rely on having enough images such that models can understand words coherently as language. You could draw a picture of a sign that says "children crossing" not because you can understand and remember exactly what an image of such a sign would look like, but because you have an understand of English and the character set that would let you reproduce it. If you tried to learn to create the same sign in Arabic you'd either need to see a huge number of signs to learn from or (more likely) build a language model for Arabic.

The kind of abstract understandings that we know we can train in language models just aren't learned by image transformers at this scale (or likely any practical scale). A language model could easily understand: "A red cube is stacked on top of a blue plate, a green pyramid is balanced on the red cube" and infer things like the position of the pyramid relative to the blue plate, image models quickly fall over with such examples.

An interesting nascent (and hacky) example of the benefits of combining models is people are using language models like GPT-3 to create better prompts for image models.

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