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Notes -
If this were Stability, I'd have suspected a finetune (or these days they seem to prefer using hypernetworks etc.) to produce that classical soulless stock image feel, with old men making the Harold grimace, smartly dressed black entrepreneurs crossing the finishing line, brain tissue looking like lava lamp clumps in a nondescript neon-lit emptiness, and so on. Not sure if OpenAI intends to offer customization of that kind.
Ad for your dashed hopes of regulatory action and the «Contributor Fund»: this looks very unsurprising to me, because as you say, relying on red tape when the models and techniques have proliferated and people run Stable Diffusion on their iPhones (literally) would be long-term disastrous.
I think corporations will try the embrace-extend-extinguish route with regards to content creation, and regulators will attempt to choke the next generation of AIs with preemptive X-risk framing.
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