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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32807 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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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.

I followed Emad's twitter handle for a while, and... I kind of hate to say this, but doesn't he seem like an idiot? I don't know if he's trying to play-act at his impression of a visionary founder, but his twitter posts seem like they were written by a twelve year old, the vocalizations of his putative plans for Stability AI seem to pivot by the day, every post on his Reddit AMA is "yes" when people ask if he is working on a thousand different projects (many nonsensical), and his only achievement so far has been to pay a bunch of money to buy up an A100 cluster at AWS (I think?) and then offer it to an academic research team in Germany to actually build a model. That was a great move for the world, and would be a great move for an AI startup founder who knew how to channel that lightning in a bottle, but I haven't seen any indication that he has a second act.

I guess he was successful enough as an energy trader to afford the A100s in the first place, but there are lots of dumb traders who got lucky, and I'm not sure how transferrable the skills of a competent energy trader are to running an AI research organization.

I think Emad is substantially more intelligent than he lets on on twitter/discord, but also «visionary founder» is often to some extent an idiot; they both naturally exhibit those traits and learn this hot dog vendor chutzpah from the noxious superstimuli-ridden startup culture depicted in one famous sitcom*. (Does Musk's Twitter indicate intelligence?) It's good marketing at this stage of the project, if anything – followers love him.

In reality they are doing some clever things to work around their late comer disadvantage. For example, they're hiring all the memey Twitter ML stars who have been underappreciated by corporations; hardmaru is not Hinton or Le Cun, but he's good and also decades younger, so it's an interesting bet. I am also not sure if these nonsensical projects are not at least 50% real – everything he posts related to audiovisual generation is in principle doable and his hires ought to be chomping at the bit to do it, only hamstrung by compute.

He is also much colder and rational in business matters than the hyperactive tweeting indicates. This quid pro quo NovelAI-Automatic story is evidence enough; «community vibes» are very important but not as important as moneyed partnerships.

Ultimately, the idea seems to be «fuck it, we need compute, any ML talent we can get and visibility, the rest is easy». And even if the rest is still hard, I can see where he's coming from. It's jumping into the last door of the departing train. With what Stability has got, they are an entity at least theoretically capable of surviving the Purge by means of some of those galaxy brain business ideas. The second act, then, is triage.

April 24 / May 7, 1919

I’m rereading The Precipice [Goncharov’s Обрыв]. It is long but so intelligent and forceful. Still I have to force myself — given that I find these Mark Volokhovs so repulsive now. What a multitude of hooligans have descended from this Mark! “How can you creep into someone else’s garden and eat their apples?” “But what does this mean: ‘someone else’s garden or apples’? Why can’t I eat when I feel like it?” Mark is a brilliant creation, and here lies the remarkable business of artists: an individual captures, distills and reifies a type, one that has existed diffuse in the air, and does it so well that sometimes his presence and influence increase a hundredfold—in complete disregard to the purpose his portrait had. One wanted to poke fun at the remnants of knighthood, and has created a figure who never existed in life, but became the catalyst for hundreds of Don Quixotes to spring into existence. Another wanted to castigate all the things that were associated with Mark, but wound up giving birth to thousands of Marks whose origins were already not in life but in books.

Generally speaking, how does one distinguish between that which is real and that which books, the theater, and films give us? Very many living people who have taken part in my life have had, most likely, far less of an impact upon me than heroes of Shakespeare and Tolstoy. Others have allowed Sherlock Holmes to enter their lives, and some maid allows in some woman whom she saw in an automobile on the movie screen.

– Ivan Bunin, Cursed Days.

Incidentally, Thomas Gaiton Marullo's translation (at least my copy) is nonsensical, to the point he seems to confuse Goncharov in the author's speech with Cervantes and utterly mangles the passage about real people and characters. I tend to suspect that this is one reason for the weird reputation of Russian lit, which some Westerners adore and others take to be cryptic pretentious ravings of drunk madmen. Our prose is often philosophical, but it's more like philosophy of the naive Socratic and Western Moralist tradition and not any clever Postmodernist sort; a translator needs intelligence as well as common sense to work with it, not indecent infatuation with Ze Slavic Soul. One shouldn't let Muscovite culture pass through Brooklyn intellectuals on the way to the library.

Here's hoping, particularly if he continues to train and disruptively open-source interesting models. But... I dunno, I've heard a lot of successful founders speak publicly and privately and they usually don't sound like idiots to me.

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