site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15608 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

16
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Requiring that people hold valid licenses for their entire training sets isn't even enforceable enough to do anything

Why do we think this is unenforceable? Unappetizing because it hits AI hard, sure, but surely not unenforceable.

NAI, who suffered a high-profile hack & went on to watch their model be used as the basis for a thousand merges and derivatives, recently posted an infographic about how you can use their (unique, supposedly) style tokens to identify if a model is derived from theirs, and even the rough degree to which it was mixed in.

Tokens (even unused tokens!) are identifiable components of the model file structure, and (probably?) have to be. Combinations of tokens (which almost all of the NAI style tokens are) would be harder if you didn't know them, but they're still testable in seconds on consumer GPU or minutes on CPU. But very few people are interested in controlling tokens, and while NAI isn't the only group, there's not a ton of artists there.

Artists want to enforce on the media-level output, which is... more complicated, at best.

Well how would you enforce it?

Any model without an associated public data set is presumed guilty.

ban proprietary ML

I mean I guess that works, and I don't even have objections to that. But I don't think presumed guilt is legally tractable.

Models don't have rights.

The people who make them do. The civil forfeiture argument was never convincing to anybody. I don't see how this is any different.

My hypothetical model is speech which is free by default and you need to prove it's illegal in court before you can censor me or you're denying me due process.

Otherwise, enjoy the crypto wars again, I'm sure we can find a way to make weights fit on a t shirt.

A completed model doesn't really have stored information about the datasets used to generate it in any accessible manner (not least of all because it could easily outsize the model by several orders of magnitude). Someone could easily say a model was generated on dataset X and instead use dataset X + dataset Y, and proving otherwise would be very hard at current understanding of how models work.

And there's a variety of complications downstream from that -- if the original model X was trained on purely legal data, and someone brings a tuned model that they say was only trained on a subselection from rights-compliant source, for example.

(And then there's the downstream economic forces: if half of the image hosts require you to give up whatever AI/ML rights for submission, then this goes wonky places even if most hardcore artists don't use them.)

Right the only way to make this work would be nothing up your sleeve training-wise. You'd provide your training set and if your model can't replicate, bam, you're busted.

You'd need to disclose not only your training set, and model, but also the training environment and initial configuration. And then someone would need to spend hundreds to hundreds of thousands to do the actual training.

That's an interestingly roundabout way of mass-banning, but it runs into the same problem as just trying to ban the tech, in that a lot of people are just going to smuggle AI-gen outputs as 'naturally'-generated.

You'd need to disclose not only your training set, and model, but also the training environment and initial configuration

Done and done.

That's an interestingly roundabout way of mass-banning

I'm ok with this.

a lot of people are just going to smuggle AI-gen outputs as 'naturally'-generated.

Which is going to happen anyway, in fact it already is happening.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats