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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31311 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?

Your AI will never draw anything embarrassing if its training set has been compiled by Bowdler and Whitehouse. Can't draw a nipple if you've never seen one.

Ehhhhh that underestimates the ability of users to generate something that resembles lewd content by combination of prompts/concepts that are individually non-obscene.

The AI has never seen a human nipple, but if it understands human anatomy otherwise, and has seen other nipple-esque things, and will reproduce those in the appropriate positions on the human body, you can presumably get 90% of the way there.

Kinda like how the Eggplant emoji (especially when used with other emojis) is pretty much never used to communicate vegetable-related concepts.

Some possible examples from the DallE subreddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/y3wjlc/the_guy_who_makes_surprise_for_his_friends_at_a/

https://i.redd.it/mfqpopheavi91.jpg

https://i.redd.it/0o30m0l4z1r91.png

https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/xsqjyn/a_new_emoji_to_show_sucking_on_a_cough_drop/

Innocent prompts that, in human eyes can absolutely evoke something unintended.

I'm reminded of a couple of famous quotations.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"
-John Gilmore

"Life, uh, finds a way."
-Dr. Ian Malcolm

Yep. And you can only neuter your AI's capabilities to prevent shenanigans so far before it becomes too dysfunctional to actually serve the intended purpose.

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