6 ms·

>once they figure out how to control potentially harmful generations Is it just me, or does anyone else think that this is an impossible and futile task? I don

• hertzrat 4y ago
  How Orwellian. It’s like newspeak: make it impossible to express certain thoughts
• buildbot 4y ago
  Yeah, the best they can do is the filter's on top of the output. These models are complex enough that with some reverse engineering you can find "secret" languages to instruct them that would be able to get around input filtering.
  • adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    AI Engine Optimisation could be a good consultancy gig. Figure out how to get your clients the results they want by gaming the rules and filters. Reminds me of the mysterious control of Conjoiner Drives in Alastair Reynold's books.
• adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  Right? Any keyboard can generate "harmful" content, do we need to figure out how to prevent "harmful generations" at the USB HID level?
  • robocat 4y ago
    Run the filter on the image output, not the written input?
    • jwitthuhn 4y ago
      Stable diffusion does run a filter on the output in its default configuration. Any image it deems 'unsafe' gets replaced with a picture of Rick Astley. The thing about that is that it is open source, so you can trivially disable that filter if you like. https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion/blob/69ae4b35e0a0f6ee1af8bb9a5d0016ccb27e36dc/scripts/txt2img.py#L309 https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion/blob/69ae4b35e0a...
    • bongoman37 4y ago
  • orbital-decay 4y ago
    I half expect this could be a genuine startup these days.
• modeless 4y ago
  OpenAI's filters are a total joke. I tried to upload The Creation of Adam (from the Sistene Chapel), blocked for adult content. "Continued violations may restrict your account". Yeah, it has naughty bits in it, but it's probably in the top ten most recognizable pieces of art ever made. I tried to generate an image of "yarn bombing", blocked for violence. They have the most advanced AI in the world and they can't solve the Scunthorpe problem?
  • justinjlynn 4y ago
    The most advanced AI in the world isn't advanced enough to solve that, just yet. Either that, or it's not worth it for them to use it to do so.
  • geoah 4y ago
    I was repeatedly warnings by gpt3 for trying to create images of a “rubber duck”. No idea what it thought I was looking for.
    • foobarbecue 4y ago
      Maybe because "rubber" is a term for condom? If so, yikes.
    • throwaway290 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_Duck_(sculpture)#Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_Duck_(sculpture)#Censor...
  • vintermann 4y ago
    They're not content filters as much as Doing Something filters. They're there to convince people that they're doing something, and of course if it wasn't zealous and regularly tut-tutted people for desiring a rubber duck, you wouldn't know they were doing something.
• xt00 4y ago
  The reason why this is such a game changer is that it is not controlled on some central server.. its like saying paper and pencils can be revoked from people if somebody doesn't like what you do with it... its an amazing new technology.. let people use it..
• ironmagma 4y ago
  It’s impossible and futile, but that has never stopped legislators or attorneys before.
  • JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    It's not impossible or futile. It works well today and is entirely voluntary. No lawyers or lawmakers were involved. You can turn it off if you want to; it's a simple convenience.
• systemvoltage 4y ago
  People need to read John Carmack and John Romero's epic adventures of Doom: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-of-Doom-David-Kushner-audiobook/dp/B008KGXM6A https://www.amazon.com/Masters-of-Doom-David-Kushner-audiobo... Even in the 90's they had to fight hordes and hordes of Californian nutjobs (Diane Feinstein et. al.) that wanted to ban violent video games. These people would be certainly cancelled in today's world, wouldn't hold a chance. Because, how dare you allow violence in video games to ...children!? Our civilization depends on allowing wacko's do their thing as far as it is within limits of the law. Let them be offensive as fuck. These are the people that herald and propel society forward by their heterodox thinking. Society is going to decay fast, it already is.
  • vintermann 4y ago
    The original Doom had "Italian cannibal film" levels of gore, heavily pixelated of course (not as if they had a choice in 1992), but in such that you could see that it was scans. Plus of course a lot of over-the-top satanic cliches to tick off the fundamentalists. But nothing remotely sexual - that's a bridge too far in the US.
  • daenz 4y ago
    You make a great point... we can't stop the decay, so the growth has to outpace it.
  • JaimeThompson 4y ago
    >hordes of Californian nutjobs (Diane Feinstein et. al.) Lots of people from other states, including Texas, in that list too. It wasn't just a California / Left issue.
    • systemvoltage 4y ago
      Yea definitely when they started a studio in Dallas, I don't remember the congress persons that were on similar stance as Diane. During the 90's, progressives played a larger role though. There was also Mortal Kombat fiasco: > During the U.S. Congressional hearing on video game violence, Democratic Party Senator Herb Kohl, working with Senator Joe Lieberman, attempted to illustrate why government regulation of video games was needed by showing clips from 1992's Mortal Kombat and Night Trap (another game featuring digitized actors). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_United_States_Senate_hearings_on_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_United_States_Senate_hear...
• mrtksn 4y ago
  I find it very immoral too, it's like the islamist trying to prevent the prophet pictures drawn. Not that I want to offend muslims or make "harmful" content but this notion that specific type of content creation needs to be imposed is very very problematic. Americans freak out of nudity all the time, something that is not considered harmful in many other places. The fear of images and text and the mission to restrain it is pathetic. Anyway, it won't be possible to contain it. Better spend the effort on how to deal with bad actors instead of trying to restrain the use of content creation tools.
  • derac 4y ago
    Yeah, it's taking the impulse to control everything from our own mind and putting it into an artificial one. Seems to me a lot of our suffering is borne of that impulse.
• armchairhacker 4y ago
  The thing is that people can make harmful art themselves. Photoshopping people's faces on nudes and depicting graphic violence has been a thing since digital photography if not painting in general. I mean, look at all the gross stuff which is online and was online way before these Neural Networks. The issue with these neural networks isn't the content they create, it's that they can create massive amounts of content, very easily. You can now do things like: write a Facebook crawler which photo-shops people's photos on nudes and sends those to their friends; send out mass phishing emails to old people with pictures of their grand-kids bloody or in hostage situations; send out so many Deepfakes for an important person that nobody can tell whether any of their speeches is legitimate or not. You can also create content even if you have no graphic design skills, and create content impulsively, leading to more gross stuff online. Spam, misinformation, phishing, and triggering language are already major issues. These models could make it 10x worse.
  • rcoveson 4y ago
    Where today it takes some far-from-Jesus deviant artists a whole day to draw a picture of Harry Potter making out with Draco Malfoy, with the power of AI, billions of such images will flood the Internet. There's just no way for a young person to resist that amount of gay energy. It's the apocalypse fortold by John the Revelator.
    • adhesive_wombat 4y ago
      > It's the apocalypse fortold by John the Revelator. I literally read a chapter of Inhibitor Phase where there's a ship called "John the Revelator" less than an hour ago. I haven't otherwise seen that phrase written down for years. Spooky (and cue links to the Baader-Meinhof Wikipedia article).
      • goldenkey 4y ago
        For context: https://youtu.be/5hucTDV1Fvo https://youtu.be/5hucTDV1Fvo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Patmos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Patmos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Revelator_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Revelator_(song)
• dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
  Reminds me of a toy girl doll I heard about which had a speech generator which you could program to say sentences but had "harmful" words removed, keeping only wholesome ones. I immediately came up with "Call the football team, I'm wet" and "Daddy lets play hide the sausage" as example workarounds. It's entirely pointless. Humans are vastly superior in their ability to subvert and corrupt. Even if you were able to catch regular "harmful" images humans would create a new categories of imagery which people would experience as "harmful", employ allusions, illusions, proxies, irony etc. It's endless.
  • zzleeper 4y ago
    I naively asked for a "sperm whale opening its mouth in the middle of the ocean" on DALL-E and got a warning :/
    • dnissley 4y ago
  • AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    I would argue that a group of humans is actually superhuman at corrupting and subverting any given system What a great insight which I find both extremely poignant and simultaneously disheartening Perhaps this will come as a comfort to the people who are vehemently against creating human-level AI systems
  • torotonnato 4y ago
    Another example of funny subvertion, Chinese style: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Baidu_10_Mythical_Creatures https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Baidu_10_Mythical_Creatures
  • worldsayshi 4y ago
    Sure it would be a fools errand to filter out "harmful" speech using traditional algorithms. But neutral networks and beyond seems like exactly the kind of technology that is able to respond to fuzzy concepts rather than just sets of words. Sure it will be a long hunt but if it can learn to paint and recognize a myriad of visual concepts it ought to be able to learn what we consider to be harmful.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  I was once a guest at a tech think tank, early 2000s, people all in their 60s at the time They spent years grappling with online worlds because of the idea that people might/could represent themselves as a different gender, they wanted the technology to exist and had dreamed about it for decades they just got caught up on that That was comical because it was also out of touch at the time period as well Its interesting how people squirrel and spiral over useless things for some time
• quitit 4y ago
  I don't see the point. Idiots are fooled by far less convincing images. Humanity has had the ability to lie with pictures since the invention of photography. The field of special effects can be described as lying about things that don't matter. Without using Stable Diffusion, I can still photoshop an image or deepfake a video. Stable Diffusion isn't really changing what's possible here, and arguably is less advanced than what's possible with Deepfakes or even the facial filters available on social networks. Like with all deceptive imagery: one just needs to use their noggin. * Also I might add: the article is actually out of date on some aspects, because this technology is evolving so rapidly. Literally every day there is a new and interesting way that people are applying the tech.
  • JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    It's no different than Google images, which is also voluntarily polite by default. In both tools you can get naughty images, but you have to tell the tool that's okay. This is not about censorship or moralizing. It is just having the tool know when it's allowed to do that stuff. It's a key basic product feature if you're actually using the thing for content and not just having fun making pictures Everyone acting like there's some kind of free speech issue should go into their account and turn the filter off, then try to calm down
• tjs8rj 4y ago
  Regardless of the practicality: why do they think it’s their role to be the morality police? If there’s anything we’ve learned from history, it’s that we’ve always been morally wrong in some way, very often in our most strongly held beliefs. This AI in a different time would be strictly guided to produce pro-(Catholic Church/eugenics/slavery/racist/nationalist) content.
  • worldsayshi 4y ago
    I think they are just afraid of bad publicity. We remember some AI experiments mostly for their ability to generate profanity.
    • hoseja 4y ago
      And the corporate creators freaking out about the profanity. Microsoft's Tay wouldn't be remembered so fondly if Bill didn't immediately pull the plug when channers made her say the n-word.
      • belltaco 4y ago
        Bill?
  • acdha 4y ago
    > Regardless of the practicality: why do they think it’s their role to be the morality police? It’s not just morality - there reportedly have already been multiple subreddits of non-consensual porn trying to mimic real people and underage porn. The legality of that is a minefield but it doesn’t end there. If that’s what they become known for it affects funding, hiring, people deciding whether to use their software, etc. and the more prominent that is the more likely that they’ll be hauled before legislators to talk about problems. Even simple things like legal demands to remove celebrities from the training sets could be pretty time-consuming.
• zmmmmm 4y ago
  devil's advocating, given they have trained it so well to generate images in spite of all expectations, is it really so hard to imagine that they can't also train it to understand what images not to generate? It already had to understand not to generate things that don't make sense to humans. How does this not just amount to "moar training"? The hardest thing is that the training data it will need is a gigantic store of objectionable (and illegal) content ... probably not something many groups are eager to build and host.
• foobarbecue 4y ago
  No, it's easy... just teach it Asimov's 3 laws :-)
• dumpsterlid 4y ago
  Well, it depends.. are you talking about significantly mitigating harmful uses of stable diffusion or completely stopping them? The latter... of course it isnt going to happen but there are plenty of practical things that can be done to mitigate.
• donpark 4y ago
  It makes sense if the intent is to protect Midjourney from being blamed for misuse. If they saw the potential misuse yet chose to do nothing about it, they'd be blamed. Lack of perfect solution is not an excuse for not offering any protection.
• dqpb 4y ago
  It’s not just about the futility of it, it’s also about correctness. Are breasts unsafe? According to Open AI they are.
• jdougan 4y ago
  Examples from the past, chat with blocks: http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns-speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...
• thrwawy74 4y ago
  I literally spent the whole first 3 hours figuring out ways to generate porn. They don't allow words like sex, cock, etc so you use prompts like intercourse and phallus. At one point I thought they were screening for particular names so you'd say things like "the brother of mako in the legend of korra" instead. It's just an endless game of cat and mouse not worth putting effort into. Got bored, now I'm playing with the dev api. People have been showing how to integrate this into Photoshop and Gimp and it's pretty cool.
  • truffdog 4y ago
    Try using character names from Overwatch
  • GaggiX 4y ago
    you can run the model on your own, then it became to easy to generate porn to be honest
• rich_sasha 4y ago
  Reminds me of a joke: three guys get locked up for a long time. Out if boredom they start telling jokes to each other, but as the supply is finite, they are retelling them all the time. Eventually they number them, then just shout out eg "27", and they are all laughing. Then a new inmate joins, doesn't know what's going on but figures that if you say a number, people laugh. So he goes "14!". But nothing happens. The others tell him "you didn't tell the joke right". How is the poor AI meant to know that jokes 6, 13 and 38 are sexist?
  • pzone 4y ago
    That’s a good joke though I prefer the punchline “It’s all in the delivery.”
• xg15 4y ago
  Agreed. I'm also not sure how this is practically supposed to work if they really publish the entire model. Right now, all they do is design a specific license, right? Or are there certain safeguards built into the model itself? That being said, I'd still think publishing the model (vs keeping it as a closed-source API) is a good move. Otherwise, we'd move forward into a world where one of tge most significant technological advancements must be gatekept forever, which I'd frankly find even more dystopic.
• JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  It's just you. The goal is to have a checkbox which keeps the system from generating naughty images in casual use. This has absolutely nothing to do with censorship. It's a nonsense concept and it's not clear what you think censorship actually is. If you set the system to make tall rectangles, are you censoring squares? It's absolutely exhausting how people on HN attempt to cast any form of telling a tool what you want the tool to make as if you're somehow morally governing something It's just telling the machine what to make Not everything is a desperate ethical dilemma Sometimes you just want the things you create to be straightforwardly usable You understand that the filter is voluntary, and that the initial delay requirement (long gone) was about Discord adult image rules, right? You're not just moralizing censorship by habit where there was none, trusting hn to overreact when that word was abused, right?
• hackerlight 4y ago
  > impossible and futile task If we can't even do this, how are we ever going to align AGI? I see these efforts as part of a nascent effort at alignment research (along with the more proximate reason, which is avoiding bad PR from model misuse).
• isaacfrond 4y ago
  MS Word was introduced almost 40 years ago. You wouldn't believe the filth it still allows you to create.