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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Just to give an update on a comment I made a little while ago about China and AI art: I might have been wrong, because it turns out that a Chinese social media site opened up an AI-powered repainting tool back in November. The idea is simple: you give it a picture, it anime-ifies it.

My assumption was that China, which had been doing some crackdowns on "soft" tech like social media a while ago, would not allow the common citizen to wield such generative power, not when there's the small possibility of someone making something unflattering to the Party or Xi. I assumed, for this reason, that China would not catch up to and surpass the US in AI research even if OpenAI and Stable.ai censor their AIs to avoid invoking the wrath of powerful progressives (though see also...), because the CCP would not take any risk with technology that was originally intended to be democratized. But "Different Dimension Me" looks to possibly be using Stable Diffusion or perhaps something like NovelAI, so we'll see if China feels as if it can master AI without it bringing them down.

My impression is that the CCP is not opposed to people having access to tools, so long as those tools are centralized enough for the Chinese government to benefit enough from them. So long as the tool is web-based in a way that the uploaded images could be stored and identified, I don’t really see a contradiction.

((This philosophy is far from specific to China; a lot of US regulatory capabilities have similar motivations))

Yeah, I didn't consider at first that they could just not distribute the code.

To be fair, it's not clear that they can; ghost shifts are probably assisted by the unofficial sanction of at least mid-level officials if they're not practically condoned, but still represent 'personal' access to surprisingly large and immobile tools. I'd put >90%+ odds that a majority of the developers for this app have a copy of the ckpt they developed on thumb drive, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's already been leaked somewhere. And it'd be even harder to block outside SD variants.

But even if that happens, the median and 99% tail-use will involve a ton of data, very likely with a lot of data attached to it.