This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
Thank you for this write-up. Things seem to be happening very quickly with a lot of volatility, so it's hard to say where things will go, but reading this makes me a little more pessimistic about the future of AI art. I had hoped that Stable Diffusion would offer a sort of "AI of last resort" that users could rely on that was largely free from authoritarian control, but how AUTOMATIC1111 was treated, and the comment about "handling edge cases" are both very concerning. I'm reminded of how dreams of a democratic open web from the 90s and early 2000s have been dashed in the intervening decades through most communication being controlled by a handful of censorious companies, with the logistics of setting up alternatives being too high of a hurdle to overcome for actual open alternatives to exist in a meaningful manner. That said, I don't know enough about AI art software to tell if a similar thing is likely to happen here; at the least, the logistics of collecting and collating the data required to train such software seems like a major hurdle, even before getting into the legal issues.
Also:
That link goes to https://todo.later/. Were you intending to replace that with a different URL?
Yes indeed, that todo link should've been replaced with a link to a transcript of Emad's recent Interview.
I failed to find the transcript in my browser history, so I've relinked the video in its place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link