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Porean


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 04 23:18:26 UTC

				

User ID: 266

Porean


				
				
				

				
3 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 04 23:18:26 UTC

					

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User ID: 266

To which tribe shall the gift of AI fall?

In a not particularly surprising move, FurAffinity has banned AI content from their website. Ostensible justification is the presence of copied artist signatures in AI artpieces, indicating a lack of authenticity. Ilforte has skinned the «soul-of-the-artist» argument enough and I do not wish to dwell on it.

What's more important, in my view, is what this rejection means for the political future of AI. Previous discussions on TheMotte have demonstrated the polarizing effects of AI generated content — some are deathly afraid of it, others are practically AI-supremacists. Extrapolating outwards from this admittedly-selective community, I expect the use of AI-tools to become a hotly debated culture war topic within the next 5 years.

If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?

My kneejerk answer to this was, "The Left, of course." Left-wingers dominate the technological sector. AI development is getting pushed forward by a mix of grey/blue tribers, and the null hypothesis is that things keep going this way. But the artists and the musicians and the writers and so on are all vaguely left-aligned as well, and they are currently the main reactionary force against AI.

A few followups to last week's post on the shifting political alignment of artists:

HN: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

The AI Unbundling

Vox: What AI Art means for human artists

FurAffinity was, predictably, not the only site to ban AI content. Digital artists online are in crisis mode, and you can hardly blame them -- their primary income source is about to disappear. A few names for anyone here still paying for commissions: PornPen, Waifu Diffusion, Unstable Diffusion.

But what I really want to focus on is the Vox video. I watched it (and it's accompanying layman explanation of diffusion models) with the expectation it'd be some polemic against the dangers of amoral tech nerds bringing grevious harm to marginalised communities. Instead, what I got was this:

There's hundreds of millions of years of evolution that go into making the human body move through three-dimensional space gracefully and respond to rapidly changing situations. Language -- not hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind that, actually. It's pretty recent. And the same thing is true for creating images. So our idea that like, creative symbolic work will be really hard to automate and that physical labor will be really easy to automate, is based on social distinctions that we draw between different kinds of people. Not based on a really good understanding of actually what's hard.

So, although artists are organising a reactionary/protectionist front against AI art, the media seems to be siding with the techbros for the moment. And I kind of hate this. I'm mostly an AI maximalist, and I'm fully expecting whoever sides with Team AI to gain power in the coming years. To that end, I was hoping the media would make a mistake...

Seeing as no one else has discussed this, I'll try to give a brief overview of the Drama that has taken place in the Stable Diffusion community over the last few days.


On 7th Oct, most of the source code, private models, and proprietary technology of NovelAI is leaked on /sdg/.

NovelAI's anime art generation stack was (is) significantly better than the open source tech available, so tooling is quickly made available to work with the leaked models. More specifically, the developer for the most popular offline Stable Diffusion tool, AUTOMATIC1111, immediately implements features to work with NovelAI's "Hypernetworks".

Within a day, AUTOMATIC1111 is accused of code theft and banned from the Stable Diffusion community, a decision explicitly backed by Emad. This causes a lot of Drama to happen,

  • Because the stable-diffusion-webui project is extremely popular; no other open source tool comes close in functionality,

  • Because it's ambiguous whether any code was truly stolen or not,

  • Because NovelAI was discovered to have illegally copied open source code in their leaked repositories, an error that was admittedly quickly reverted by their devs,

  • Because of the optics of the situation -- Stability AI backing a closed-source company over a popular open source figure?

The drama expands further when links to stable-diffusion-webui are scrubbed from /r/stablediffusion, causing the former moderators of that subreddit to reveal that the moderation team of the subreddit experienced a quiet takeover by representatives of Stability AI. It is additionally claimed that a similar process occured for the SD Discord server.

And as an extra bonus, the coomers using SD have gone into high alert after Emad remarked in an interview that the release of SD V1.5 would be delayed to "handle edge cases" & (de)bias the model against "topless women".


Insofar as I have a take on all of this, it's going to be some blend of "holy shit Emad please stop doing bad PR" and the Seven Zillion Witches problem. I find it horrific that the mutually agreeable agenda of "let's keep AI open and available" is doing its best to self-destruct via the usual processes of internet catfights and the amplification of minor differences within what ought to be a united ingroup.

Unironically just read every LessWrong article about Definitions. In a sane world, we'd just create new words to distinguish between transwomen and women and call it a day.

What's the point?

No, really -- let's say you win. You've convinced the entirety of the western public that COVID-19 was made in a Chinese biolab. Okay, now what?

I have 180°'d on my opinions, thanks.

Why are the majority programmers so enthusiastic about machines that can code but not artists?

Because they aren't. They're collectively deluding themselves into believing in the «soul» and that programming will never be automated by AI. Just like certain artists are.

I am a programmer. OpenAI scares me. I'm putting every effort I've got into the Grind, because I think the industry's due for a phenomenal crash that'll leave the majority in the dumps. You are free to disagree.

This is pretty clearly a woman.

We have differences in lived experiences, then. I've said this before, but I really think Hanania nailed it by hypothesising that the anti-trans side cannot be understood without acknowleding how some are simply innately disgusted by what they perceive as abnormal physical features. Or, to simplify, too many people have a disgust reflex against non-passing transsexuals for the movement to succeed.

You can talk about how we should all apply Bayesian reasoning to deduce that an odd looking person is likely to prefer she/her, but that's a tall order for someone experiencing literal transphobia (as in: an instinctive, uncontrollable fear/repulsion) as they look at the person.

As for your commentary on how "passing is transphobic", I think it has been independently suggested a thousand times by some of the more radical trans activists.

AI art continues to be terrible at generating pornographic images where a lot of freelance artists' requests come from.

My dude, I listed three services that provide what I believe to be good quality AI pornography. I have personally been making use of these services and I suspect I will not be using my old collection anymore, going forwards.

It also has trouble maintaining a coherent style across multiple images,

This is just a prompt engineering problem, or more specifically cranking up the scale factor for whichever art style you're aping && avoiding samplers that end with _A.

Remember that people were extremely gung ho about the future of stuff like motion controls and VR in gaming

And I can assure you I was not one of these people. Neither was I a web3 advocate, or self-driving car optimist, or any other spell of "cool tech demo cons people into believing the impossible".

For Stable Diffusion, there is no demo. The product is already here. You can already get your art featured / sold by putting it up on the sites that permit it. I know with 100% certainty that I am never going to pay an old-school artist* for a piece of digital art again, because any ideas I had were created by me with a few prompt rolls an hour ago.

*I might pay for a promptmancer if I get lazy. But that will be magnitudes cheaper, and most likely done by people who used to not be artists.

Because of course every single woman is pro-abortion, of course a Republican-voting guy is not going to know any women who might be pro-life, of course no woman picked at random in the USA is going to be "I think the Supreme Court decision was great".

Are you reading the same article as me?

Redd: And by the way, I do talk to my female friends about abortion. Abortion is a problem for Republicans. That’s why I’m not sure if we’re going to win small or win big. But pretty much everything else lines up on our side.

I think the migration just failed, and I plan on doing some data scraping / analytics this weekend to demonstrate it.

The Motte is no stranger to the JQ. You do not need to waste your time pointing out the basic statistics: we've seen them, we've discussed them, and we've had far longer and nuanced discussions on the topic.

Or, to put it in a way you'll understand: Lurk more. The "hey I just noticed this thing about Jewish overrepresentation..." skit makes you stick out like a lamppost.

Delete (yes -- delete) all distractions. Mute everything. Lock your phone in a safe. Ensure that the only kind of rest you're permitted is passing out on the floor from exhaustion.

Is there something misleading with the way I phrased my comment? I don't understand why multiple people have succeeded in reading "programmers will be completely replaced by AI" into my words.

And this isn't a nitpicking thing. It is an extremely important distinction; I see this in the same way as the Pareto Principle. The AI labs are going to quickly churn out models good enough to cover 95% of the work the average software engineer does, and the programming community will reach a depressive state where everyone's viciously competing for that last 5% until true AGI arrives.

Your first paragraph misses how hard it is for human programmers to achieve those things, if it is even possible under current circumstances (find me a program that can acquire farmland & construct robots for it & harvest everything & prepare meals from raw materials). Even hiring an army of programmers (AI or no) would not satisfy the preconditions necessary for getting your own food supply, namely having an actual physical presence. You need to step beyond distributed human-level abilities into superhuman AI turf for that to happen.

I agreed with the gist of the article, but I can't help but wonder if this topic was 99% covered by LW at some point.

For example - France has a fertility rate around 1.8. 1.7 for the US. Germany 1.4.

In the east with more strict gender norms the rich societies however have far more abysmal fertility rates - Japan 1.3, South Korea 0.8, Taiwan 1.1, Singapore 1.2.

Note that the nations you've listed in the second category, despite having "strict gender norms", generally have both males and females employed at similar rates.

The link between feminism and fertility is simple -- working women have less time for childraising, and society never restructured itself to account for this loss. The Asian nations you've listed (and also Germany!) all have norms of extreme workaholic culture compared to the Western nations you've listed, and this is likely a significant cause of the reduced fertility in the former.

Whether 21st century feminism is doing well or not is missing the point; the bulk of the damage was done by developing the norm of both parents working in families.

That does nothing to dispute the claim that supporting pro life policies are costing republican votes. Ditto for basically everyone in the parent comment tree. I don't understand how so many motteposters are conflating "There's lots of pro-life people" (true) with "Being pro-life will make it easier to win elections" (do you believe this?)

Ah, well... Fuck. That covers every idea I had and more.

I see it as a herald for things to come. Perhaps you feel that furries are scum and deserve what's coming for them. That's all well and good, but the broader point to be read lies in the topic of job displacement in general.

"AI workers replace humans" used to be a prediction, not an accurate description of current reality. We now have (or are on the brink of having) a successful demonstration of just that. The reactions and policies and changes that arrive from the current ongoing chaos are going to set precedent for future battles involving first-world job replacement, and I am personally very interested in seeing what kind of slogans and parties and perhaps even extremism emerges from our first global experiment.

This list will probably make it a lot easier for rDrama trolls (among others) to fit in, which is a bit unfortunate. At the same time, this glossary of terms is really accurate and well-cited, and I cannot help but admire it for that.

Text, audio-vqvae, image-vqvae (possibly video too) tokens in one stream

How do you suppose it reads tiny words with a VQVAE? Even an RQVAE shouldn't have the pixel precision needed to see tiny 5px font letters.

or?

In all likelihood, you'd need something like 8x3090, but that's about as hard to trace as a stealth weed growbox in a basement. Inference, I expect, also won't be feasible on normal consumer machines, so it'll incentivize some stealthy cloud computing, maybe very small-scale.

I'll bet against that. It's supposed to be an Imagen-like model leveraging T5-XXL's encoder with a small series of 3 unets. Given that each unet is <1B, this is no worse than trying to run Muse-3B locally.

The paradigm and reason for party allegiances is not equality and certainly not about government handouts, considering how every citizen of their home country sidesteps the government to black markets where exchanges are made at better rates. The current Democrat party is actually damaging their bottom line through their fiscal policy.

Call me skpetical. What makes you confident it has a strong impact on voter habits? You have presented a theory -- a possible factor of influence -- but no reason to believe it has any more predictive power than any other explanation of voter preferences.

Okaay I have no idea what's going on with the comment box. The link I have in there right now when I click the edit button is:

https://streamable.com/e/e/ollvts

but it's getting rendered as

https://streamable.com/e/e/e/ollvts

GDB is

  1. not easy to learn

  2. even less easy to learn if you are a part of the modern GUI/webapp/the-fuck-is-a-shell generation (so, the problem statement at hand)

  3. doesn't even scale to larger projects, so you can hardly say you'll use it in a real job

Compare it with, let's say, the chrome debug console. Or the vscode debugger for python. They're far more intuitive than x/10g info all-regs, b 0x1234, ni×100, etc.