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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.

Streamable giving me a "couldn't find your video" error on that interview.

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

You should reread your comment and laugh at it: The rendering bug you're pointing out is happening again, so your description isn't being posted accurately.

(You can see what people wrote by using the "View source" button. In this case, there should only be a single "/e/" in the URL, but the site is adding a second/third one.)

Bruh