The open source community should pitch in.. goFundMe
If Stability was a nonprofit, sure. Otherwise, lol.
the models came out of an academic CS lab...can always fall back to those....
Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
81–90 of 140 posts
Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad someone brought this up. Artists, especially fan artists, will only hurt themselves if they advocate for classifying transformative works as infringing. Fan art has been so normalised that people have forgotten that it used to be considered legally dubious. Better to advocate for reskilling and social safety nets; automation affects everyone, not just them.
Fair use has 4 factors. Transformative is one of them. Recently, courts have gotten much more interested in a different factor, the "commercial intent" factor. While fan art is less transformative than AI training, it's not commercial and it's not competing with the original work (if anything, it enhances the market for the original work). Generative AI models are both commercial products and very successful competit…
> it's not commercial and it's not competing with the original work
Yes it is and yes it does.
"Fan art" is "fan" in name only.
If you read back on my original post, you will see that I am talking about almost the entire online professional art commissions market.
From online, to convention centers, and more.
All of this is commerical and all of this competed with the IP owners.
People just sell other people's IP in all of these places.
Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
#83Stability 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.
> damage many feel they've done to the art community If the "art community" can't understand what an insane gift SD1.5 and SDXL was to them then I don't know what to tell them. Without those open models we could have easily ended up in a world where this tech existed but was only in the hands of people who could pay OpenAI or Adobe a month to use it, and I mean with the power of it what should that cost be? I mean to…
My understanding is the art community has two problems:
1) Brand destruction: when SD was new, lots of people put "Greg Rutkowski, trending on artstation" in their prompts in order to get better images. It's possible that Greg Rutkowski being the single most popular example of this means he personally lucked out on this (some reporting suggests so), and the exposure really did boost his career. Do you think everyone else this has happened to was so lucky?
If I image search for "Greg Rutkowski", I see some cool things yes, but I also see this: https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/gt4Z0uOIrrmop13OoU...
I suspect that many others have suffered from this association.
2) Substitution: the exact opposite problem.
Now that the image generators are pretty good, why should anyone hire an artist?
This image was generated in 267 milliseconds, for free: https://github.com/BenWheatley/AI-art/commit/d4e0322a30ab508...
That image is not perfect, but it's good enough for people like me, and that by itself is an economic risk to the future employability of that entire segment of the economy.
This really is important and does matter because all the talking heads were all busy confidently saying creative jobs like "artist" and "writer" were safe, and that it was truck drivers and factory workers who needed to re-skill, and thus we as a society have done basically nothing to prepare for or mitigate this economic disruption.
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I don't know what's coming, not for me, not for anyone.
But I get why they feel scared, and I get why they feel this has taken something from them, even though the specific arguments about copyright and "parroting" that make it into public discussion (Gell-Mann amnesia warning) are often also deeply flawed and unconvincing.
To me, this is a trademark issue in the first case, not a copyright one; and in the second, the same disregard for workers that led to the creation of the actual literal Communist Manifesto.
Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, they lost my interest entirely when they launched SD 2.0 and the model was worse, presumably (this was what people at the time were coming up with as the core problem) as they went overboard in their attempts at preventing it from generating naked photos (by removing so much from the training set that it no longer seemed to understand as well what a human looked like). The wider community then just got stuck on…
SDXL is amazing. The community is entrechend in 1.5 because that's what everyone is now familiar with, IMO
Ok, I'll try SDXL? But, I continue to believe that it was the botched release and attempts to push people with SD 2.x that led to whatever is being talked about in this thread for why Stability gets "so little support from the community": I lost interest in what they were working on well before they released SDXL, as I was no longer convinced that their newer stuff would be better than their older stuff due to 2.x.
FWIW, "everyone had gotten so used to 1.5 that they just didn't want to bother with 2.x" might provide a similar mechanism, if a very different place for the blame: if people aren't paying attention to the new stuff you are building, it is going to hurt your "support".
Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
To expand upon this, the majority of the complaints I see are coming from the online community where the largest part of the material seems to be based of IP/copyright violation by the artists. I've been part of multiple communities who have decided to ban AI art because of a moral clause against using other's peoples works without their permission, but yet which don't like having it pointed out that the IP holders h…
> the largest part of the material seems to be based of IP/copyright violation by the artists What do you mean by this? Fan art is pretty well known to be fair use, particularly because it is transformative and it has no commercial intent . AI training is transformative alright, but the commercial intent part is a huge factor in the analysis. The fair use analysis is very much not clear at this point.
> it has no commercial intent.
Under what possible analysis does art sold at a convention, by full time professional artists, not count as being done for a commercial purpose?
Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
You shouldn't judge people by what Forbes says, but what people do. So far, Emad delivers on what he promises (with some delays here and there), and Stability.ai is the only one that publish image / video generation models at production quality.
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.
Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we go down this road right now, we are allowing superintelligent AI powered corporations to front-run the entire human race and sell everything we think back to us. It's not about theory of mind stuff. It's about just compensation of living human beings.
1848 had a publication that might interest you. I think the manifesto is missing some important aspects about game theory and human nature, and for some of that theory of mind is indeed very important, and that's why this particular political experiment didn't work out in the end despite the good intentions and that several aspects have become globally accepted.
I’ve read it but I think this case is much more unambiguous. Workers are paid; Marx would argue they are systematically underpaid and disempowered.
In this case the workers are not paid at all. Their work is not even acknowledged. It’s closer to cultural appropriation but quite a bit more unambiguous than that as well since this isn’t people learning from people. This is mass uncompensated value harvesting.
The number of hands benefiting here are incredibly tiny. In theory you could have one human owning the entire human mind and renting it back. This is the danger of present generation AI, not Skynet scenarios, and it anything the sci-fi stuff distracts us from this.
It’s like an information theory equivalent of today’s shoplifting epidemic except there are tiny gangs of only a few shoplifters able to run at Mach 10 and shoplift from every store in the country in days.
Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the largest part of the material seems to be based of IP/copyright violation by the artists What do you mean by this? Fan art is pretty well known to be fair use, particularly because it is transformative and it has no commercial intent . AI training is transformative alright, but the commercial intent part is a huge factor in the analysis. The fair use analysis is very much not clear at this point.
> it has no commercial intent. Under what possible analysis does art sold at a convention, by full time professional artists, not count as being done for a commercial purpose?
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 large-scale selling of fan art at conventions, that fan art is meaningfully competing with (ie reducing) the market for the original IP.
Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
To expand upon this, the majority of the complaints I see are coming from the online community where the largest part of the material seems to be based of IP/copyright violation by the artists. I've been part of multiple communities who have decided to ban AI art because of a moral clause against using other's peoples works without their permission, but yet which don't like having it pointed out that the IP holders h…
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, and given your other point about their financial position, is a direct financial threat to them. The morality of the situation seems to be that it is wrong because of the financial harm, but recognizing that such an argument is rarely accepted, it must instead be justified by some other argument, any other argument, that condemns the outcome.
I don't think this is anything particularly unique. How often do we find things wrong because of a logical argument as to why it is wrong, and how often do we find a logical argument to justify our felling that something is wrong?
There is also a element of helplessness. No matter what the government does, pandora's box has been opened and it can't be closed. While it might slow down the development of better AI, it isn't going to stop it and banning existing software isn't going to be possible. The damage has been done, and even if the artists have an overwhelming victory, they are only going to recover a fraction of lost ground only to eventually lose it again.
Re: Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, they lost my interest entirely when they launched SD 2.0 and the model was worse, presumably (this was what people at the time were coming up with as the core problem) as they went overboard in their attempts at preventing it from generating naked photos (by removing so much from the training set that it no longer seemed to understand as well what a human looked like). The wider community then just got stuck on…
SDXL is amazing. The community is entrechend in 1.5 because that's what everyone is now familiar with, IMO
>The community is entrechend in 1.5 because that's what everyone is now familiar with, IMO
That probably has some weight to the community's decision to still use 1.5. Other reasons (and more important IMO) why we're still stuck on 1.5 is due to nerfing 2.0, and the plethora of user trained models based on 1.5.
I'm continued to be amazed by the quality possible with 1.5. While there are pros and cons of each of the different offerings provided by other image generators, I haven't seen anything available to the public that can compete with the quality gens a competent SD prompter can produce yet.
SDXL seems to have taken off better than 2.0, but nothing so amazing to justify leaving all the 1.5 models behind.