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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31262 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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So something I don't really get is this:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/12/23400270/ai-generated-art-dall-e-microsoft-designer-app-office-365-suite

As far as I can tell the AI art generation thing has been pretty exclusively led by tiny startups; this is because unrestricted text-to-image for the masses is the mother of all adversarial environments where your AI will, regardless of the safeguards you put around it, inevitably be shown to have drawn or said something embarrassing, and if you're a tiny startup you have the luxury of not giving a shit. Not so for the big players, which is presumably why Google's never released any of their fancy text-to-image or text-to-video tech demos.

(One exception: DALL-E 2 was released by OpenAI, but they only did that after Stable Diffusion and Midjourney threatened to make it irrelevant-- that was basically a forced move.)

So. How does this not explode almost immediately in Microsoft's collective face? And why would Microsoft be leading the generative-art charge instead of Google, given Google's massive lead here?

They might be hoping to reframe the whole issue. Nobody blames Photoshop when people make fake naked pictures of celebrities: maybe by making it a tool like Word and Excel, they're hoping that people will see it as neutral in whatever it's used for. I doubt this will work (if Photoshop were released today, would naughty pictures be blamed on Adobe?) but they might be willing to take the risk, gambling on Office's existing image as a neutral suite of tools.

You make an interesting comparison to Photoshop, since people are already used to not thinking of Photoshop as being responsible for what people create with the app.

I guess it depends on the degree to which the LLM is perceived to be creating an image from whole cloth vs "just helping"

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