13 ms·

Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders

101 points by muzz 2y ago

__loam 2y ago
Stability always seemed like a dark horse thanks to the reputation of their founder and their open source business model. I do get some schadenfreude from seeing them like this considering the damage many feel they've done to the art community. E: -4 in 10 minutes. Stay classy hackernews. I hope this company and OpenAI choke on the algorithmic disgorgement when the law catches up.
- api 2y ago
  The entire AI industry is powered by piracy at a massive scale. Very little training data is properly licensed or compensated. It's just more obvious with open models because we can investigate them. Closed models are sausages and we don't know what went in. Download a movie and you can get sued or your Internet connection terminated, but pirate the entire collective output of humanity and sell it back to us from behind a paywall and that's fine. I have more sympathy for Stability here because at least they opened the models. IMHO models trained on not-properly-licensed (pirated) data should at the very least not be copyrightable and should be public domain. (These piracy enterprises are aware of this as a possible legal outcome in some jurisdictions, so the whole AI safety bullshit performance is an attempt to scare people about open models to head off the potential of questionably-trained models being declared uncopyrightable and forced to be released.)
  - wyldfire 2y ago
    > Very little training data is properly licensed or compensated. Could it ever be the case, I wonder, if we could trust/enforce/believe that a model had so abstracted what it learned from the training inputs such that the model was not a derived work from them? I've seen the examples where the model is able to reproduce recognizable characters from popular media. Those look like they might be "just" overfitting? While I can see that as desirable from the point of view of being able to create a picture of "Robocop shopping for diapers". But maybe we could compromise and converge to a point where AI art isn't quite so demonized and instead is seen as a useful tool.
    - api 2y ago
      They could at least make an effort to purchase licenses from all non-open content, comply with open licenses, and exclude content otherwise. They aren't making anything more than the most lame token effort because they don't care.
      - wyldfire 2y ago
        But that's just it - if we believe that what the model learns from the training material is abstract enough, they shouldn't license the content at all. Humans learn from and are inspired by art all the time. They create new works that are not considered derived works, despite there being obvious influence. Could we conceive of the same circumstance being possible with machine learning?
        api 2y ago
        If we go down this road right now, we are allowing superintelligent AI powered corporations to front-run the entire human race and sell everything we think back to us. It's not about theory of mind stuff. It's about just compensation of living human beings.
        ben_w 2y ago
        1848 had a publication that might interest you. I think the manifesto is missing some important aspects about game theory and human nature, and for some of that theory of mind is indeed very important, and that's why this particular political experiment didn't work out in the end despite the good intentions and that several aspects have become globally accepted.
        api 2y ago
        I’ve read it but I think this case is much more unambiguous. Workers are paid; Marx would argue they are systematically underpaid and disempowered. In this case the workers are not paid at all. Their work is not even acknowledged. It’s closer to cultural appropriation but quite a bit more unambiguous than that as well since this isn’t people learning from people. This is mass uncompensated value harvesting. The number of hands benefiting here are incredibly tiny. In theory you could have one human owning the entire human mind and renting it back. This is the danger of present generation AI, not Skynet scenarios, and it anything the sci-fi stuff distracts us from this. It’s like an information theory equivalent of today’s shoplifting epidemic except there are tiny gangs of only a few shoplifters able to run at Mach 10 and shoplift from every store in the country in days.
  - altruios 2y ago
    >and sell it back to us from behind a paywall and that's fine. That's the sticking point. If it's an open tool for humanity's benefit being created given back to us, that's one thing... but to sell it back to us... With that said, piracy is close to what's happening... but I think we should be careful classifying where/what exactly is the matter. I reason I think that matter's lies may be down the end of a slippery slope, or it may be straight ahead of us... the future is hard to know. If we classify it poorly we may unintentionally cause human(post/trans-human) right's issues {if I upload my consciousness to a digital mind, I don't want archaic laws to dominate what I can see/compute based on the material of which I'm made}.
    - __loam 2y ago
      These companies need to make money because they took VC money and training these things take 10s if not 100s of millions of dollars. Also nice to see the complete nonsense of digital mind uploading on hackernews vis a vis this discussion. If that happens we'd need to change a lot of laws anyway.
      - altruios 2y ago
        The mind uploading is just one of many potential outcomes. To me the more interesting concern: we can't seem to agree on the bare minimum requirements for sentience/experience. Maybe the 'bare minimum' is 'electricity runs through it'. It may be that these LL/SD/ML models are having an 'experience' without the proper memory/state/internal-control to achieve sentience/consciousness. Law's need to change, that's for sure (look at copyright). And taking VC money to do anything Open seems like a trap. There are government grants... but yeah... there exists a whole host of (related or similar) problems in that.
        ben_w 2y ago
        Thought crime in 2084: the name given for a crime for which the only evidence is a scan of your brain. e.g. "You imagined someone naked! That's a non-consensual deepfake of intimate personal imagery!"
  - cma 2y ago
    > questionably-trained models being declared uncopyrightable and forced to be released I think uncopyrightable is a likely outcome, but where are you coming up with forced to be released?
  - clbrmbr 2y ago
    > IMHO models trained on not-properly-licensed (pirated) data should at the very least not be copyrightable and should be public domain. My understanding is that ML model weights cannot be copyrighted as an original creative work. They are trade-secrets and protected through contracts but once leaked to third parties it’s not a copyright violation to use/distribute. Whether the model is actually a derivative work of the training data is another interesting question. Or is my theory off here?
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      The main argument I have seen (which is also OpenAI's in their legal briefs) is that it is fair use. The idea of "fair use" is that you are conceding that you are infringing by creating a derivative work, but it's still okay. Implied in the fair use argument is that it is a derivative work.
      - Hoasi 2y ago
        > Implied in the fair use argument is that it is a derivative work. You can get all LLMs to spit out almost exact copies of known IP visuals from movies and games. For instance, with Dalle-E and Midjourney, it's relatively easy to get similar pictures from film and game studios. Those are copies with minor changes. It would be hard to argue otherwise in court. The same happens with ChatGPT spitting out verbatim passages from New York Times articles.
  - stale2002 2y ago
    > The entire AI industry is powered by piracy at a massive scale. Forget about AI. Instead it is almost the entire art industry, wholesale! The semi-professional online art commissioning market is almost entirely copyright infringing fan art works, being sold without permission of IP owner. Yes, fan art is infringing. Especially when it is sold. And if you go to a convention center, to the artists section, you will see that over half of the booths are straight up selling other people's IP without permission. This is the case for conventions, online art commissions, etsy/handmade items, all of it. Its all illegal, all infringing, and the only reason why anyone cares now is because someone else can do the same thing that others have been doing for decades, but quicker and cheaper.
    - ronsor 2y ago
      I'm perfectly fine with getting rid of AI... if all fan artists paid the statutory and actual damages for their infringing activities.
      - pclmulqdq 2y ago
        What actual damages are there for fan art? Can you prove that work done by a fan artist would otherwise have been done by the original creator and that fan artists are costing sales of the original works they create fan art for?
    - CaptainFever 2y ago
      I'm glad someone brought this up. Artists, especially fan artists, will only hurt themselves if they advocate for classifying transformative works as infringing. Fan art has been so normalised that people have forgotten that it used to be considered legally dubious. Better to advocate for reskilling and social safety nets; automation affects everyone, not just them.
      - pclmulqdq 2y ago
        Fair use has 4 factors. Transformative is one of them. Recently, courts have gotten much more interested in a different factor, the "commercial intent" factor. While fan art is less transformative than AI training, it's not commercial and it's not competing with the original work (if anything, it enhances the market for the original work). Generative AI models are both commercial products and very successful competitors with the original works they used for training.
  - hanniabu 2y ago
    > The entire AI industry is powered by piracy Just like all art. When you draw something you don't cite every single thing you've seen and experienced in life that inspired your drawing and style. Nor did you own or pay royalties to all that inspiration either.
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      >When you draw something you don't cite every single thing you've seen and experienced in life that inspired your drawing and style. Oh please. There is an astounding degree of nuance and context missed in your example here.
      - __loam 2y ago
        I'm kind of down to let people follow this dead end reasoning since it's legally irrelevant. Makes it much easier to disregard.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    If there is a model which is, for the sake of the argument, absolutely definitely and unambiguously powered by piracy at a massive scale, then the act of forcing it to be released is going to necessarily entail all of the possible harms from that specific act of IP piracy. IMO, if a model is deemed to be such, all copies of that model should be destroyed. Actual copyright law allows for the destruction of equipment used for copyright infringement, and those laws were written in the days where this meant "a printing press". > the whole AI safety bullshit performance The people who care about AI safety have been loudly warning about it for so much longer than these companies and models have existed, that they roll their eyes at newspapers using stock photos from Terminator to illustrate the discussion. > The entire AI industry Also includes self-driving cars, spam filters, medical diagnosis tools, …
  - five_lights 2y ago
    >The entire AI industry is powered by piracy at a massive scale. ARRRRR.. This is a grey area still for me. It's a neural network. It works similar to our brains work, but more consistent. It's doesn't seem like piracy to me. If an artist was really into Salvidor Dali, and happened to imitate his surrealist style, it would not be considered piracy. In fact, this is how art has evolved over the centuries. Each relevant artist in the past has incrementally contributed to what we call art today. I feel like the people unwilling to accept that AI may impact their career are more worried about putting food on the table than anything else, which is very understandable, but it's just the cost of progress. The bigger problem we need to deal with is how to retrain and provide job placement who are affected by disruptive technologies. We've really failed the public on this in the past and I don't think it's worth nerfing emerging tech just to keep people employed. This is not the first or last time this has happened, and it's going to be more frequent as technology advances.
    - __loam 2y ago
      > It's a neural network. It works similar to our brains work, but more consistent. Irrelevant and incorrect. > It's doesn't seem like piracy to me. It's pretty indisputably piracy, whether or not it's legal/fair use/whatever. Many of the training sets included material like the books3 corpus which was downloaded to a server somewhere. That is simply piracy, doesn't matter why they downloaded it. I believe many artists rightly refuse to accept this threat to their livelihoods because it was built on their labor. It's so fucking rich to see people patronizingly suggest that this is just an economic problem and those artists better just figure out a new profession. You built a commercial product on unlicensed data. Do you actually think the law is going to agree that that's fair use?
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > It's pretty indisputably piracy, whether or not it's legal/fair use/whatever. Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'indisputably' that I wasn't previously aware of. > I believe many artists rightly refuse to accept this threat to their livelihoods because it was built on their labor. This model is trained from scratch using only public domain/CC0 and copyright images with specific permission for use: https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one Does it change anything? If all the other models were deleted, and this was the only one left, and all future models also had to be similarly licensed, would it change even one single point? Even if it was the only remaining model and this kind of licensing a requirement for all future work, artists would still be automated out of their highly skilled yet poorly paid profession. It still sucks. There's still no nice way to convey that. > You built a commercial product on unlicensed data. Do you actually think the law is going to agree that that's fair use? What do you think the Google search engine is, if not a commercial product built on unlicensed data? The courts go both ways on this specific question with Google depending on the exact details, because nothing in law is as easy or simple as the clear-cut, goodies-vs.-baddies, black-and-white morality play you want this to be. The fact that Stability AI have not yet been sued out of existence in a simple open-and-shut court case about copyright infringement ought to have demonstrated both this point, and also that the question "is this piracy?" is, in fact, disputable.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago
  reddit is down the hall and to the left.
  - __loam 2y ago
    Sure. It's clear this community isn't open to critical views on this topic.
    - pelagicAustral 2y ago
      Maybe this community is more open to objective analysis of the articles that are shared, and no so much of passional arguments that benefit no one.
      - __loam 2y ago
        Okay. Objectively, there are several ongoing lawsuits regarding this technology and its use of unlicensed data. Fair use is not as clear cut a case as many here would have you believe, and that's the opinion of many lawyers. Nilay Patel of the verge, who has a law degree, had a conversation about this with another lawyer on his podcast recently and it seems like the legal community is much less hopeful about it than people whose paycheck might rely on this technology.
    - zarathustreal 2y ago
      1. It’s not just this community 2. It’s not just “critical views” it’s any view that deviates from the velocity or acceleration of the norm 3. Don’t take it personally, votes aren’t about what you said they’re about how the voter feels after having read it
    - orbital-decay 2y ago
      Or maybe they are just not sure how making things open to everyone can make someone a "dark horse".
      - __loam 2y ago
- ronsor 2y ago
  The "art community" did most of the damage to itself.
  - SkyBelow 2y ago
    To expand upon this, the majority of the complaints I see are coming from the online community where the largest part of the material seems to be based of IP/copyright violation by the artists. I've been part of multiple communities who have decided to ban AI art because of a moral clause against using other's peoples works without their permission, but yet which don't like having it pointed out that the IP holders have withheld their permission of their characters being used for unlicensed artwork. While some of this are people practicing their artwork and I don't see any reason we should care what artwork someone practices on, this is also the general trend for artwork being sold. Go to any convention where artists sell work and look at how much artwork is sold of characters the artists do not have license to. While I think one can take a philosophical stance against the current IP laws that outlaw this, such a stance would make it quite hard to oppose the use of content in training an AI. In short, if those making the AI stole IP to train the AI, it was stolen from a community that was fine with IP theft that benefitted them. And if the claim is that it wasn't IP theft because the law was generally tolerating it (as long as no one became so much a target they received a C&D), then unless there are some lawsuits won against the AI it would be equally allowed. (And of course individuals will have their own philosophical stances which might be much more consistent, I'm speaking of the generalized view I have developed from overall interactions with parts of the community and as such it is not meant to be strongly prescriptive to any specific member of the community).
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      > the largest part of the material seems to be based of IP/copyright violation by the artists What do you mean by this? Fan art is pretty well known to be fair use, particularly because it is transformative and it has no commercial intent. AI training is transformative alright, but the commercial intent part is a huge factor in the analysis. The fair use analysis is very much not clear at this point.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  > damage many feel they've done to the art community. Boo hoo. This is not the first nor the last democratization of art. First people weren’t starving so many more could afford to become artists, printing presses could mass copy art, world wide shipping lanes moved styles, computer aids then photoshop, now AI. It’s always “been damaging to the art community”. Now… to steelman the argument, it’s never been lower skill or easier to create your own modification or idea and get it in the style of some artist. In my opinion the low barrier to entry is obviously going to seem unfair - but - this is just going to make physical art more valuable. If I were a sad-about-ai artist, I would jump in and see how new tools could improve my game.
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  > damage many feel they've done to the art community If the "art community" can't understand what an insane gift SD1.5 and SDXL was to them then I don't know what to tell them. Without those open models we could have easily ended up in a world where this tech existed but was only in the hands of people who could pay OpenAI or Adobe a month to use it, and I mean with the power of it what should that cost be? I mean to have such an advantage the monthly cost could have easily been in the hundreds a month like high end CAD/3D/VFX software is and only viable for huge studios leaving normal people in the dirt. Emad's decisions mean for the rest of eternity a tool that could have ended up entirely locked behind an Adobe paywall can now be run on any machine you owned and tweaked entirely on your own hardware to work in a way specifically beneficial to your workflow. I'm an artist and designer too, the fear of how fast these tools can replicate styles and take jobs becomes a lot less scary when I can take advantage of it myself or enhance my workflow with it myself without paying a subscription tax to do so. But if the "art community" can't understand or imagine how bad this situation could have been then I don't know what to tell them, some people just like being screwed over I guess...
  - ben_w 2y ago
    My understanding is the art community has two problems: 1) Brand destruction: when SD was new, lots of people put "Greg Rutkowski, trending on artstation" in their prompts in order to get better images. It's possible that Greg Rutkowski being the single most popular example of this means he personally lucked out on this (some reporting suggests so), and the exposure really did boost his career. Do you think everyone else this has happened to was so lucky? If I image search for "Greg Rutkowski", I see some cool things yes, but I also see this: https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/gt4Z0uOIrrmop13OoUVc https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/gt4Z0uOIrrmop13OoU... I suspect that many others have suffered from this association. 2) Substitution: the exact opposite problem. Now that the image generators are pretty good, why should anyone hire an artist? This image was generated in 267 milliseconds, for free: https://github.com/BenWheatley/AI-art/commit/d4e0322a30ab50875f140fd0348ab37e9c949e50 https://github.com/BenWheatley/AI-art/commit/d4e0322a30ab508... That image is not perfect, but it's good enough for people like me, and that by itself is an economic risk to the future employability of that entire segment of the economy. This really is important and does matter because all the talking heads were all busy confidently saying creative jobs like "artist" and "writer" were safe, and that it was truck drivers and factory workers who needed to re-skill, and thus we as a society have done basically nothing to prepare for or mitigate this economic disruption. -- I don't know what's coming, not for me, not for anyone. But I get why they feel scared, and I get why they feel this has taken something from them, even though the specific arguments about copyright and "parroting" that make it into public discussion (Gell-Mann amnesia warning) are often also deeply flawed and unconvincing. To me, this is a trademark issue in the first case, not a copyright one; and in the second, the same disregard for workers that led to the creation of the actual literal Communist Manifesto.
- artninja1988 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - __loam 2y ago
    I’m sure you as the 331st user (surely we're under counting here?) will be able to realize your vision and rise above the sea of people making statistically average, derivative noise, using the same models as everyone else.
    - artninja1988 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - __loam 2y ago
        Looks like I struck a nerve if you're googling me to insult me now.
        artninja1988 2y ago
        And I am still less obsessed than you are with ai art
        __loam 2y ago
        [flagged]
        artninja1988 2y ago
        We all stand on the shoulders of giants. No reason to throw hissy fits about it
brcmthrowaway 2y ago
The open source community should pitch in.. goFundMe
- Chabsff 2y ago
  If Stability was a nonprofit, sure. Otherwise, lol.
  - caycep 2y ago
    the models came out of an academic CS lab...can always fall back to those....
SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
Every Forbes article should have the warning that they are not real publication anymore. Everything they publish is written with an intention that you believe an authors opinion as fact. The model for Stability ends in a likely way, they will be swallowed up in a payday. We have recent examples of this. For now, they’re the most open area in a garden of closing gates. And I wish them all the best.
- iancmceachern 2y ago
  Indeed. Articles can be bought outright.
- gorwell 2y ago
  *Every legacy media article
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    No argument from me, but Forbes is special in this regard. It takes $500 to be a “featured contributor” and they will post whatever nonsense you like. The brand is diluted.
    - FergusArgyll 2y ago
      See Wikipedias guidelines for sources. (ctrl-f for forbes) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources#Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
- sp332 2y ago
  Yup, that’s why the HN code shows the username after the domain now, same as Twitter users.
  - PartiallyTyped 2y ago
    I just noticed. Thanks for this friend. Much appreciated!
ruleryak 2y ago
Archived non paywall copy of the article: https://archive.is/iRIlp https://archive.is/iRIlp
- pksebben 2y ago
  Cheers to you, good citizen. I wish more people started with such links rather than waiting for someone else to make it easy to have a discussion.
  - mvdtnz 2y ago
    That's a violation of HN guidelines.
    - pksebben 2y ago
      Is it really? TIL, thanks. edit: Arguable. I assume your referring to: Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. ...and I might argue that an archive of the original is just as good, judging by the verbiage referring to "If a post reports on...". Archive links don't change, remove, or add any context, they just make it accessible. I suppose if we wanted to know this in specifics, it'd be a question for dang.
    - itsoktocry 2y ago
      Posting paywalled links should be, as well. It's borderline marketing. If I pay for the source, I don't need to find it on HN.
      - swyx 2y ago
        not true. hn surfaces quality and adds discussion. and the people who wrote the content need acknowledgement/attribution, and some conversion to paying, or they'll eventually stop. do you think good reporting/writing just falls from the sky?
        2y ago
singularity2001 2y ago
For my use cases OpenAI's DallE is often good enough. No more Discord nonsense.
- gigel82 2y ago
  You're thinking of Midjourney. Stable Diffusion is awesome, you can run it locally on consumer GPUs.
  - lordswork 2y ago
    Parent comment is classic HN: strongly held opinions with 100% confidence, 75% of the information.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Appropriately for the topic, also classic AI.
barapa 2y ago
They should consider selling flounder
blueblisters 2y ago
SD3.0 looks really good and will probably displace a lot of closed image generation models once it's out. I don't understand why Stability gets so little support from the community. They released the first usable open-source models and their models are the foundation of the most interesting AI-bashing workflows out there - VC funded or otherwise.
- liuliu 2y ago
  Yeah. It is weird. On one hand, v3 looks really good, the arch is sound, and the work is solid. On the other hand, selling Clipdrop is not a good sign (a growing startup divest is uncommon). Emad likes to talk about how they were able to retain researchers and now this, so it is hard to know what's going on.
  - xangel 2y ago
    The CEO being a fraud could be a possible reason. Just saying.
    - liuliu 2y ago
      You shouldn't judge people by what Forbes says, but what people do. So far, Emad delivers on what he promises (with some delays here and there), and Stability.ai is the only one that publish image / video generation models at production quality.
      - UberFly 2y ago
        Not just Forbes. Read about him on Wikipedia.
        five_lights 2y ago
        >However, according to him, he did not attend his graduation ceremony to receive his degrees, and therefore, he does not technically possess a BA or an MA. Oh wow, he's probably lying about his education.
skadamat 2y ago
This many people leaving and key investors resigning from the board is definitely interesting. I wonder if there's some undisclosed scandal that will break because this is pretty wild.
dreamcompiler 2y ago
Of course the verb they're looking for is founders. A flounder is a fish. Founder (as a verb) means "to fail."
- EForEndeavour 2y ago
  No, Stability hasn't foundered yet. They're floundering: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flounder https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flounder
- EnzymeFestival 2y ago
  You have floundered in analyzing the headline
- sgerenser 2y ago
  Per wiktionary (https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/founder https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/founder) Usage Notes: Frequently confused with flounder. Both may be applied to the same situation, with the difference being the severity of the action: floundering (struggling to maintain position) comes first, followed by foundering (losing it by falling, sinking, or failing). I think “flounder” is fine in this context.
- cddotdotslash 2y ago
  Confidently incorrect is certainly the worst kind.
Octokiddie 2y ago
I was looking for something about how the company actually made money, but only found this: > It’s a dramatic exodus that comes less than 18 months after Stability’s 2022 fundraise that valued the company at $1 billion. Now, the company is facing a cash crunch, with spending on wages and compute power far outstripping revenue, according to documents seen by Forbes. Bloomberg earlier reported that the company was spending $8 million a month. In November 2023, CEO Emad Mostaque tweeted that the company had generated $1.2 million in revenue in August, and would make $3 million in November. The tweet was later deleted. This sounds a lot like the two-year period leading up to the dot com crash. Insane valuations and no revenue model. Meanwhile those insanely-valued companies bought Sun Microsystems servers like there was no tomorrow. When the games ended, a lot of those insanely-valued companies went to zero and left a massive overhang of Sun hardware in their wake. Sun began its long nosedive not long after that.
uaserussia 2y ago
How can we help save Stability AI?

101 points by muzz 2y ago

Stability always seemed like a dark horse thanks to the reputation of their founder and their open source business model. I do get some schadenfreude from seeing them like this considering the damage many feel they've done to the art community. E: -4 in 10 minutes. Stay classy hackernews. I hope this company and OpenAI choke on the algorithmic disgorgement when the law catches up.

api 2y ago
The entire AI industry is powered by piracy at a massive scale. Very little training data is properly licensed or compensated. It's just more obvious with open models because we can investigate them. Closed models are sausages and we don't know what went in. Download a movie and you can get sued or your Internet connection terminated, but pirate the entire collective output of humanity and sell it back to us from behind a paywall and that's fine. I have more sympathy for Stability here because at least they opened the models. IMHO models trained on not-properly-licensed (pirated) data should at the very least not be copyrightable and should be public domain. (These piracy enterprises are aware of this as a possible legal outcome in some jurisdictions, so the whole AI safety bullshit performance is an attempt to scare people about open models to head off the potential of questionably-trained models being declared uncopyrightable and forced to be released.)
- wyldfire 2y ago
  > Very little training data is properly licensed or compensated. Could it ever be the case, I wonder, if we could trust/enforce/believe that a model had so abstracted what it learned from the training inputs such that the model was not a derived work from them? I've seen the examples where the model is able to reproduce recognizable characters from popular media. Those look like they might be "just" overfitting? While I can see that as desirable from the point of view of being able to create a picture of "Robocop shopping for diapers". But maybe we could compromise and converge to a point where AI art isn't quite so demonized and instead is seen as a useful tool.
  - api 2y ago
    They could at least make an effort to purchase licenses from all non-open content, comply with open licenses, and exclude content otherwise. They aren't making anything more than the most lame token effort because they don't care.
    - wyldfire 2y ago
      But that's just it - if we believe that what the model learns from the training material is abstract enough, they shouldn't license the content at all. Humans learn from and are inspired by art all the time. They create new works that are not considered derived works, despite there being obvious influence. Could we conceive of the same circumstance being possible with machine learning?
      - api 2y ago
        If we go down this road right now, we are allowing superintelligent AI powered corporations to front-run the entire human race and sell everything we think back to us. It's not about theory of mind stuff. It's about just compensation of living human beings.
        ben_w 2y ago
        1848 had a publication that might interest you. I think the manifesto is missing some important aspects about game theory and human nature, and for some of that theory of mind is indeed very important, and that's why this particular political experiment didn't work out in the end despite the good intentions and that several aspects have become globally accepted.
        api 2y ago
        I’ve read it but I think this case is much more unambiguous. Workers are paid; Marx would argue they are systematically underpaid and disempowered. In this case the workers are not paid at all. Their work is not even acknowledged. It’s closer to cultural appropriation but quite a bit more unambiguous than that as well since this isn’t people learning from people. This is mass uncompensated value harvesting. The number of hands benefiting here are incredibly tiny. In theory you could have one human owning the entire human mind and renting it back. This is the danger of present generation AI, not Skynet scenarios, and it anything the sci-fi stuff distracts us from this. It’s like an information theory equivalent of today’s shoplifting epidemic except there are tiny gangs of only a few shoplifters able to run at Mach 10 and shoplift from every store in the country in days.
- altruios 2y ago
  >and sell it back to us from behind a paywall and that's fine. That's the sticking point. If it's an open tool for humanity's benefit being created given back to us, that's one thing... but to sell it back to us... With that said, piracy is close to what's happening... but I think we should be careful classifying where/what exactly is the matter. I reason I think that matter's lies may be down the end of a slippery slope, or it may be straight ahead of us... the future is hard to know. If we classify it poorly we may unintentionally cause human(post/trans-human) right's issues {if I upload my consciousness to a digital mind, I don't want archaic laws to dominate what I can see/compute based on the material of which I'm made}.
  - __loam 2y ago
    These companies need to make money because they took VC money and training these things take 10s if not 100s of millions of dollars. Also nice to see the complete nonsense of digital mind uploading on hackernews vis a vis this discussion. If that happens we'd need to change a lot of laws anyway.
    - altruios 2y ago
      The mind uploading is just one of many potential outcomes. To me the more interesting concern: we can't seem to agree on the bare minimum requirements for sentience/experience. Maybe the 'bare minimum' is 'electricity runs through it'. It may be that these LL/SD/ML models are having an 'experience' without the proper memory/state/internal-control to achieve sentience/consciousness. Law's need to change, that's for sure (look at copyright). And taking VC money to do anything Open seems like a trap. There are government grants... but yeah... there exists a whole host of (related or similar) problems in that.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Thought crime in 2084: the name given for a crime for which the only evidence is a scan of your brain. e.g. "You imagined someone naked! That's a non-consensual deepfake of intimate personal imagery!"
- cma 2y ago
  > questionably-trained models being declared uncopyrightable and forced to be released I think uncopyrightable is a likely outcome, but where are you coming up with forced to be released?
- clbrmbr 2y ago
  > IMHO models trained on not-properly-licensed (pirated) data should at the very least not be copyrightable and should be public domain. My understanding is that ML model weights cannot be copyrighted as an original creative work. They are trade-secrets and protected through contracts but once leaked to third parties it’s not a copyright violation to use/distribute. Whether the model is actually a derivative work of the training data is another interesting question. Or is my theory off here?
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    The main argument I have seen (which is also OpenAI's in their legal briefs) is that it is fair use. The idea of "fair use" is that you are conceding that you are infringing by creating a derivative work, but it's still okay. Implied in the fair use argument is that it is a derivative work.
    - Hoasi 2y ago
      > Implied in the fair use argument is that it is a derivative work. You can get all LLMs to spit out almost exact copies of known IP visuals from movies and games. For instance, with Dalle-E and Midjourney, it's relatively easy to get similar pictures from film and game studios. Those are copies with minor changes. It would be hard to argue otherwise in court. The same happens with ChatGPT spitting out verbatim passages from New York Times articles.
- stale2002 2y ago
  > The entire AI industry is powered by piracy at a massive scale. Forget about AI. Instead it is almost the entire art industry, wholesale! The semi-professional online art commissioning market is almost entirely copyright infringing fan art works, being sold without permission of IP owner. Yes, fan art is infringing. Especially when it is sold. And if you go to a convention center, to the artists section, you will see that over half of the booths are straight up selling other people's IP without permission. This is the case for conventions, online art commissions, etsy/handmade items, all of it. Its all illegal, all infringing, and the only reason why anyone cares now is because someone else can do the same thing that others have been doing for decades, but quicker and cheaper.
  - ronsor 2y ago
    I'm perfectly fine with getting rid of AI... if all fan artists paid the statutory and actual damages for their infringing activities.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      What actual damages are there for fan art? Can you prove that work done by a fan artist would otherwise have been done by the original creator and that fan artists are costing sales of the original works they create fan art for?
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    I'm glad someone brought this up. Artists, especially fan artists, will only hurt themselves if they advocate for classifying transformative works as infringing. Fan art has been so normalised that people have forgotten that it used to be considered legally dubious. Better to advocate for reskilling and social safety nets; automation affects everyone, not just them.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      Fair use has 4 factors. Transformative is one of them. Recently, courts have gotten much more interested in a different factor, the "commercial intent" factor. While fan art is less transformative than AI training, it's not commercial and it's not competing with the original work (if anything, it enhances the market for the original work). Generative AI models are both commercial products and very successful competitors with the original works they used for training.
- hanniabu 2y ago
  > The entire AI industry is powered by piracy Just like all art. When you draw something you don't cite every single thing you've seen and experienced in life that inspired your drawing and style. Nor did you own or pay royalties to all that inspiration either.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    >When you draw something you don't cite every single thing you've seen and experienced in life that inspired your drawing and style. Oh please. There is an astounding degree of nuance and context missed in your example here.
    - __loam 2y ago
      I'm kind of down to let people follow this dead end reasoning since it's legally irrelevant. Makes it much easier to disregard.
- ben_w 2y ago
  If there is a model which is, for the sake of the argument, absolutely definitely and unambiguously powered by piracy at a massive scale, then the act of forcing it to be released is going to necessarily entail all of the possible harms from that specific act of IP piracy. IMO, if a model is deemed to be such, all copies of that model should be destroyed. Actual copyright law allows for the destruction of equipment used for copyright infringement, and those laws were written in the days where this meant "a printing press". > the whole AI safety bullshit performance The people who care about AI safety have been loudly warning about it for so much longer than these companies and models have existed, that they roll their eyes at newspapers using stock photos from Terminator to illustrate the discussion. > The entire AI industry Also includes self-driving cars, spam filters, medical diagnosis tools, …
- five_lights 2y ago
  >The entire AI industry is powered by piracy at a massive scale. ARRRRR.. This is a grey area still for me. It's a neural network. It works similar to our brains work, but more consistent. It's doesn't seem like piracy to me. If an artist was really into Salvidor Dali, and happened to imitate his surrealist style, it would not be considered piracy. In fact, this is how art has evolved over the centuries. Each relevant artist in the past has incrementally contributed to what we call art today. I feel like the people unwilling to accept that AI may impact their career are more worried about putting food on the table than anything else, which is very understandable, but it's just the cost of progress. The bigger problem we need to deal with is how to retrain and provide job placement who are affected by disruptive technologies. We've really failed the public on this in the past and I don't think it's worth nerfing emerging tech just to keep people employed. This is not the first or last time this has happened, and it's going to be more frequent as technology advances.
  - __loam 2y ago
    > It's a neural network. It works similar to our brains work, but more consistent. Irrelevant and incorrect. > It's doesn't seem like piracy to me. It's pretty indisputably piracy, whether or not it's legal/fair use/whatever. Many of the training sets included material like the books3 corpus which was downloaded to a server somewhere. That is simply piracy, doesn't matter why they downloaded it. I believe many artists rightly refuse to accept this threat to their livelihoods because it was built on their labor. It's so fucking rich to see people patronizingly suggest that this is just an economic problem and those artists better just figure out a new profession. You built a commercial product on unlicensed data. Do you actually think the law is going to agree that that's fair use?
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > It's pretty indisputably piracy, whether or not it's legal/fair use/whatever. Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'indisputably' that I wasn't previously aware of. > I believe many artists rightly refuse to accept this threat to their livelihoods because it was built on their labor. This model is trained from scratch using only public domain/CC0 and copyright images with specific permission for use: https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one Does it change anything? If all the other models were deleted, and this was the only one left, and all future models also had to be similarly licensed, would it change even one single point? Even if it was the only remaining model and this kind of licensing a requirement for all future work, artists would still be automated out of their highly skilled yet poorly paid profession. It still sucks. There's still no nice way to convey that. > You built a commercial product on unlicensed data. Do you actually think the law is going to agree that that's fair use? What do you think the Google search engine is, if not a commercial product built on unlicensed data? The courts go both ways on this specific question with Google depending on the exact details, because nothing in law is as easy or simple as the clear-cut, goodies-vs.-baddies, black-and-white morality play you want this to be. The fact that Stability AI have not yet been sued out of existence in a simple open-and-shut court case about copyright infringement ought to have demonstrated both this point, and also that the question "is this piracy?" is, in fact, disputable.
123yawaworht456 2y ago
reddit is down the hall and to the left.
- __loam 2y ago
  Sure. It's clear this community isn't open to critical views on this topic.
  - pelagicAustral 2y ago
    Maybe this community is more open to objective analysis of the articles that are shared, and no so much of passional arguments that benefit no one.
    - __loam 2y ago
      Okay. Objectively, there are several ongoing lawsuits regarding this technology and its use of unlicensed data. Fair use is not as clear cut a case as many here would have you believe, and that's the opinion of many lawyers. Nilay Patel of the verge, who has a law degree, had a conversation about this with another lawyer on his podcast recently and it seems like the legal community is much less hopeful about it than people whose paycheck might rely on this technology.
  - zarathustreal 2y ago
    1. It’s not just this community 2. It’s not just “critical views” it’s any view that deviates from the velocity or acceleration of the norm 3. Don’t take it personally, votes aren’t about what you said they’re about how the voter feels after having read it
  - orbital-decay 2y ago
    Or maybe they are just not sure how making things open to everyone can make someone a "dark horse".
    - __loam 2y ago
ronsor 2y ago
The "art community" did most of the damage to itself.
- SkyBelow 2y ago
  To expand upon this, the majority of the complaints I see are coming from the online community where the largest part of the material seems to be based of IP/copyright violation by the artists. I've been part of multiple communities who have decided to ban AI art because of a moral clause against using other's peoples works without their permission, but yet which don't like having it pointed out that the IP holders have withheld their permission of their characters being used for unlicensed artwork. While some of this are people practicing their artwork and I don't see any reason we should care what artwork someone practices on, this is also the general trend for artwork being sold. Go to any convention where artists sell work and look at how much artwork is sold of characters the artists do not have license to. While I think one can take a philosophical stance against the current IP laws that outlaw this, such a stance would make it quite hard to oppose the use of content in training an AI. In short, if those making the AI stole IP to train the AI, it was stolen from a community that was fine with IP theft that benefitted them. And if the claim is that it wasn't IP theft because the law was generally tolerating it (as long as no one became so much a target they received a C&D), then unless there are some lawsuits won against the AI it would be equally allowed. (And of course individuals will have their own philosophical stances which might be much more consistent, I'm speaking of the generalized view I have developed from overall interactions with parts of the community and as such it is not meant to be strongly prescriptive to any specific member of the community).
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    > the largest part of the material seems to be based of IP/copyright violation by the artists What do you mean by this? Fan art is pretty well known to be fair use, particularly because it is transformative and it has no commercial intent. AI training is transformative alright, but the commercial intent part is a huge factor in the analysis. The fair use analysis is very much not clear at this point.
SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
> damage many feel they've done to the art community. Boo hoo. This is not the first nor the last democratization of art. First people weren’t starving so many more could afford to become artists, printing presses could mass copy art, world wide shipping lanes moved styles, computer aids then photoshop, now AI. It’s always “been damaging to the art community”. Now… to steelman the argument, it’s never been lower skill or easier to create your own modification or idea and get it in the style of some artist. In my opinion the low barrier to entry is obviously going to seem unfair - but - this is just going to make physical art more valuable. If I were a sad-about-ai artist, I would jump in and see how new tools could improve my game.
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
> damage many feel they've done to the art community If the "art community" can't understand what an insane gift SD1.5 and SDXL was to them then I don't know what to tell them. Without those open models we could have easily ended up in a world where this tech existed but was only in the hands of people who could pay OpenAI or Adobe a month to use it, and I mean with the power of it what should that cost be? I mean to have such an advantage the monthly cost could have easily been in the hundreds a month like high end CAD/3D/VFX software is and only viable for huge studios leaving normal people in the dirt. Emad's decisions mean for the rest of eternity a tool that could have ended up entirely locked behind an Adobe paywall can now be run on any machine you owned and tweaked entirely on your own hardware to work in a way specifically beneficial to your workflow. I'm an artist and designer too, the fear of how fast these tools can replicate styles and take jobs becomes a lot less scary when I can take advantage of it myself or enhance my workflow with it myself without paying a subscription tax to do so. But if the "art community" can't understand or imagine how bad this situation could have been then I don't know what to tell them, some people just like being screwed over I guess...
- ben_w 2y ago
  My understanding is the art community has two problems: 1) Brand destruction: when SD was new, lots of people put "Greg Rutkowski, trending on artstation" in their prompts in order to get better images. It's possible that Greg Rutkowski being the single most popular example of this means he personally lucked out on this (some reporting suggests so), and the exposure really did boost his career. Do you think everyone else this has happened to was so lucky? If I image search for "Greg Rutkowski", I see some cool things yes, but I also see this: https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/gt4Z0uOIrrmop13OoUVc https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/gt4Z0uOIrrmop13OoU... I suspect that many others have suffered from this association. 2) Substitution: the exact opposite problem. Now that the image generators are pretty good, why should anyone hire an artist? This image was generated in 267 milliseconds, for free: https://github.com/BenWheatley/AI-art/commit/d4e0322a30ab50875f140fd0348ab37e9c949e50 https://github.com/BenWheatley/AI-art/commit/d4e0322a30ab508... That image is not perfect, but it's good enough for people like me, and that by itself is an economic risk to the future employability of that entire segment of the economy. This really is important and does matter because all the talking heads were all busy confidently saying creative jobs like "artist" and "writer" were safe, and that it was truck drivers and factory workers who needed to re-skill, and thus we as a society have done basically nothing to prepare for or mitigate this economic disruption. -- I don't know what's coming, not for me, not for anyone. But I get why they feel scared, and I get why they feel this has taken something from them, even though the specific arguments about copyright and "parroting" that make it into public discussion (Gell-Mann amnesia warning) are often also deeply flawed and unconvincing. To me, this is a trademark issue in the first case, not a copyright one; and in the second, the same disregard for workers that led to the creation of the actual literal Communist Manifesto.
artninja1988 2y ago
[flagged]
- __loam 2y ago
  I’m sure you as the 331st user (surely we're under counting here?) will be able to realize your vision and rise above the sea of people making statistically average, derivative noise, using the same models as everyone else.
  - artninja1988 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - __loam 2y ago
      Looks like I struck a nerve if you're googling me to insult me now.
      - artninja1988 2y ago
        And I am still less obsessed than you are with ai art
        __loam 2y ago
        [flagged]
        artninja1988 2y ago
        We all stand on the shoulders of giants. No reason to throw hissy fits about it

brcmthrowaway 2y ago

The open source community should pitch in.. goFundMe

Chabsff 2y ago
If Stability was a nonprofit, sure. Otherwise, lol.
- caycep 2y ago
  the models came out of an academic CS lab...can always fall back to those....

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago

Every Forbes article should have the warning that they are not real publication anymore. Everything they publish is written with an intention that you believe an authors opinion as fact. The model for Stability ends in a likely way, they will be swallowed up in a payday. We have recent examples of this. For now, they’re the most open area in a garden of closing gates. And I wish them all the best.

iancmceachern 2y ago
Indeed. Articles can be bought outright.
gorwell 2y ago
*Every legacy media article
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  No argument from me, but Forbes is special in this regard. It takes $500 to be a “featured contributor” and they will post whatever nonsense you like. The brand is diluted.
  - FergusArgyll 2y ago
    See Wikipedias guidelines for sources. (ctrl-f for forbes) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources#Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
sp332 2y ago
Yup, that’s why the HN code shows the username after the domain now, same as Twitter users.
- PartiallyTyped 2y ago
  I just noticed. Thanks for this friend. Much appreciated!

ruleryak 2y ago

Archived non paywall copy of the article: https://archive.is/iRIlp https://archive.is/iRIlp

pksebben 2y ago
Cheers to you, good citizen. I wish more people started with such links rather than waiting for someone else to make it easy to have a discussion.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  That's a violation of HN guidelines.
  - pksebben 2y ago
    Is it really? TIL, thanks. edit: Arguable. I assume your referring to: Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. ...and I might argue that an archive of the original is just as good, judging by the verbiage referring to "If a post reports on...". Archive links don't change, remove, or add any context, they just make it accessible. I suppose if we wanted to know this in specifics, it'd be a question for dang.
  - itsoktocry 2y ago
    Posting paywalled links should be, as well. It's borderline marketing. If I pay for the source, I don't need to find it on HN.
    - swyx 2y ago
      not true. hn surfaces quality and adds discussion. and the people who wrote the content need acknowledgement/attribution, and some conversion to paying, or they'll eventually stop. do you think good reporting/writing just falls from the sky?
      - 2y ago

singularity2001 2y ago

For my use cases OpenAI's DallE is often good enough. No more Discord nonsense.

gigel82 2y ago
You're thinking of Midjourney. Stable Diffusion is awesome, you can run it locally on consumer GPUs.
- lordswork 2y ago
  Parent comment is classic HN: strongly held opinions with 100% confidence, 75% of the information.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Appropriately for the topic, also classic AI.

barapa 2y ago

They should consider selling flounder

blueblisters 2y ago

SD3.0 looks really good and will probably displace a lot of closed image generation models once it's out. I don't understand why Stability gets so little support from the community. They released the first usable open-source models and their models are the foundation of the most interesting AI-bashing workflows out there - VC funded or otherwise.

liuliu 2y ago
Yeah. It is weird. On one hand, v3 looks really good, the arch is sound, and the work is solid. On the other hand, selling Clipdrop is not a good sign (a growing startup divest is uncommon). Emad likes to talk about how they were able to retain researchers and now this, so it is hard to know what's going on.
- xangel 2y ago
  The CEO being a fraud could be a possible reason. Just saying.
  - liuliu 2y ago
    You shouldn't judge people by what Forbes says, but what people do. So far, Emad delivers on what he promises (with some delays here and there), and Stability.ai is the only one that publish image / video generation models at production quality.
    - UberFly 2y ago
      Not just Forbes. Read about him on Wikipedia.
      - five_lights 2y ago
        >However, according to him, he did not attend his graduation ceremony to receive his degrees, and therefore, he does not technically possess a BA or an MA. Oh wow, he's probably lying about his education.

skadamat 2y ago

This many people leaving and key investors resigning from the board is definitely interesting. I wonder if there's some undisclosed scandal that will break because this is pretty wild.

dreamcompiler 2y ago

Of course the verb they're looking for is founders. A flounder is a fish. Founder (as a verb) means "to fail."

EForEndeavour 2y ago
No, Stability hasn't foundered yet. They're floundering: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flounder https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flounder
EnzymeFestival 2y ago
You have floundered in analyzing the headline
sgerenser 2y ago
Per wiktionary (https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/founder https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/founder) Usage Notes: Frequently confused with flounder. Both may be applied to the same situation, with the difference being the severity of the action: floundering (struggling to maintain position) comes first, followed by foundering (losing it by falling, sinking, or failing). I think “flounder” is fine in this context.
cddotdotslash 2y ago
Confidently incorrect is certainly the worst kind.

Octokiddie 2y ago

I was looking for something about how the company actually made money, but only found this: > It’s a dramatic exodus that comes less than 18 months after Stability’s 2022 fundraise that valued the company at $1 billion. Now, the company is facing a cash crunch, with spending on wages and compute power far outstripping revenue, according to documents seen by Forbes. Bloomberg earlier reported that the company was spending $8 million a month. In November 2023, CEO Emad Mostaque tweeted that the company had generated $1.2 million in revenue in August, and would make $3 million in November. The tweet was later deleted. This sounds a lot like the two-year period leading up to the dot com crash. Insane valuations and no revenue model. Meanwhile those insanely-valued companies bought Sun Microsystems servers like there was no tomorrow. When the games ended, a lot of those insanely-valued companies went to zero and left a massive overhang of Sun hardware in their wake. Sun began its long nosedive not long after that.

uaserussia 2y ago

How can we help save Stability AI?