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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15603 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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NSFW AI-art project Unstable Diffusion has been axed by Kickstarter, despite already hitting their funding goal. This one isn't too suprising, as KS doesnt allow NSFW and a DIY pornomaker probably was never gonna slip by that filter even if it didn't ship with visible nipples.

Kickstarter took it a step further, however, formally amending their ToS and affirming that "Kickstarter must, and will always be, on the side of creative work and the humans behind that work."

It now appears that Unstable Diffusion is being driven off Patreon too, who dont have a no-NSFW excuse. Almost certain to follow the same pattern, at this point; there are too many established artists on that platform who are willing to boycott.

The twitterati taking responsibility for the bannings are targetting payment processor Stripe next. Seems like a textbook swarm governance action.

Ks:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unstablediffusion/unstable-diffusion-unrestricted-ai-art-powered-by-the-crowd/community

Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/unstablediffusion

Current fallback:

https://equilibriumai.com/index.html

The fun part, here, however, is that the swarm isn't fighting to keep one small person or group deplatformed and defunded.

They might have a shot at succeeding (for a while) if they were.

What they're doing is trying to hold back a technology that is:

A) Already out of the bottle; and

B) backed by billions of dollars and incredibly smart and motivated people at the end of the day.

So the task of preventing AI art from largely displacing human artists is just as doomed to failure as, say, trying to prevent BitTorrent software from allowing people to pirate movies. The new equilibrium is coming, but one can make a huge show of resisting it for a while.

If they want to have a ghost of a chance at success it's going to require levels of authoritarianism that would at least require them to go full mask-off.

The twitterati taking responsibility for the bannings are targeting payment processor Stripe next. Seems like a textbook swarm governance action.

I can already smell the grifts from here. On the other hand, these people might actually believe this tech is an existential threat to their careers. And they might be right.

backed by billions of dollars

This is actually concerning to me. Google's OpenAI and the like are happy to bow before the AI Safety crowd (the 'no racist chatbots' ones, not the 'no paperclip apocalypse' ones) so long as they can still make a gorillion dollars off the technology, and that means they really have no interest in allowing the existence of seedy AI applications like porn generators. That just brings bad PR to the whole field, for literally zero benefit. (Google isnt going to be entering the smut market anytime soon) Thus I worry that we're seeing the begginimgs of another unholy alliance between the progressive left & big money, nominally in the name of moral puritanism but with the real purpose of shoving the AI cat back in the SaaS bag.

I'd not worry too much, since as mentioned people can still use BitTorrent to download movies despite there being billions of dollars going into creating such movies.

Thus I worry that we're seeing the begginimgs of another unholy alliance between the progressive left & big money,

Probably, but not for any reasons that are unique to AI, I think.

I wonder if a better example is 3D printed weapons - the full might of the state is cracking down on them, yet it's still possible. BitTorrent is technically simple, there's no capital cost AFAIK. Models need to be trained, expensively.

But trained models are not so hard to distribute and I'm not sure it is trivial to detect when someone is in the act of training a model, there's just so much compute in the world.

So go after general-purpose GPUs. We're already deploying more and more DRM tech everywhere, and AI/ML loads look sufficiently different from graphics ones that it should actually be quite easy to force (or coordinate) GPUs to require a signature with a key stewarded by Microsoft (like with UEFI) before they load and evaluate anything that looks like an ML model.

Training the latest models already requires something that is far from consumer-grade.

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