Can't believe Stable Diffusion is out for public use and that's considered “OK”

Shocker, individual who&#x27;s job depends on gatekeeping technology condemns not gatekeeping technology. Imagine.<p>&quot;It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.&quot;

So is the logic &quot;technology X is potentially dangerous and therefore should be kept in the hands of the morally ambiguous (at best) corporation that created it&quot;?<p>If Google made something dangerous, well, I don&#x27;t trust Google at all. I&#x27;d rather have it in the open so I know what I&#x27;m dealing with. (I know Stable Diffusion isn&#x27;t a google product, I&#x27;m using it as a neutral-ish example.)<p>But also, what dangers are we talking about? &quot;The model produces something racist&quot; is not _dangerous_ to anyone, it means the model needs work to make it not do racist things. Wouldn&#x27;t public release <i>help</i> with that?<p>What am I missing?

Given this and the other weirdness that keeps coming out of Google&#x27;s AI department, I find myself wondering: is AI research considered a serious area of academic inquiry, with respected scholars and stuff, or is it mostly full of crackpots and con artists and self-promoters?

I tried to find a demo of GPT3 just now and I could not. Yet in just a week I&#x27;ve seen half a dozen new projects or improvements on SD. This veneer of safety is just rent seeking bullshit.

I can&#x27;t imagine the hubris required to make a person think that because their company is rich they are especially and uniquely entitled to the fruits of academic research.

Lets hope that such self-righteous people do not get power to restrict access to new technologies to others.

&gt; Sr Research Scientist at Google. Opinions are my own (she&#x2F;her)<p>So, just the ramblings of a random person on the internet. Nothing to see here.<p>She may work in the field, but that&#x27;s just her opinion, not some technical insight, and she is not talking in the name of her company. Her opinion is as good as mine, or yours, or the guy I met at the bar last night. I fact, I think it is a bit disingenuous for her to mention her employer in her Twitter profile, it may get her in trouble.<p>Now, if Google follows up, it may have some value.

The modern day church establishment telling to stop printing presses because it&#x27;s too dangerous of a tool for the masses.

Don&#x27;t be evil.<p>We can have nice things just once, and that&#x27;s ok.<p>Yeah, researchers and big companies could have &quot;properly tested and audited&quot; it for a while before release, but then what? Is Google an expert on what is ethical to give to the public? No, they&#x27;re clearly only worried about profits, reputation, brand image, so yeah preventing nazis from using your tools is a valid concern to Google et al., but not to us. Online nazis are already doing their nazi things, just not with their latest tool.

Full title should have been: &quot;Senior research scientist at GoogleAI: “Can&#x27;t believe Stable Diffusion is out there for public use and that&#x27;s considered as ‘ok’!!!&quot;

Stop technology! Make silos, make it secret, only a few priviledged should have it. I condemn progress stop it now! He said..

It&#x27;s neither OK, nor not OK. it&#x27;s just what&#x27;s inevitably bound to happen. Even borderline magic technology like Dall-E, Stable Diffusion etc. will become commonplace over time (and it happens extra quickly with digital technology). Ethics committees and other such bodies are largely pissing in the wind with this sort of stuff, in my view.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bakztfuture.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;statement-on-stable-diffusion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bakztfuture.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;statement-on-stable-diffu...</a><p>another interesting longform statement on this topic

Putting aside the gatekeeping aspect of this comment, I found the rest of the arguments made for keeping this model closed really shallow.<p>I would have hoped for a much more reasoned and logically sound argument from a professional researcher.

Pretty funny coming from a Googler since these generators are basically search (over image-space).

<i>If you want to know how good a mousetrap is, you should not ask mice for their opinion.</i>

I can&#x27;t believe &quot;&quot;&quot;Open&quot;&quot;&quot;AI is unavailable for me to download and tinker with<p>Looking forward to Stable Diffusion 1.5!

Nobody gate keeps like data scientists and ML engineers.

There is a lot of unfounded fear about AI in general lately.<p>Reality is that AI features rarely replace anyone but amplify the individual that can incorporate it in their skillset.<p>The best option would be if models like Imagan, Dall-E and Midjourney all followed this open principle, as each of the approaches has its strengths and weaknesses and could potentially learn from each other to improve.

Between her and the other lunatic that believed his AI was sentient, I think Google should review their hiring process for their AI related roles.<p>The statement is so ridiculous I thought at first that she meant that it is not &quot;ok&quot; but &quot;amazing&quot;.

Stable diffusion is good open source software and is well motivated in a very complicated technology&#x2F;political space. Sure they inherit all of the existing problems with image datasets but they have some plans to mitigate racial and socio-political bias. The alternative is to either not do the project or make it secretive under the supposed motivation of safety. This interview is a good overview of the principles behind their approach: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YQ2QtKcK2dA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YQ2QtKcK2dA</a>

Actually, if you care about the effects on society, the safest thing to do with stable diffusion or GPT-3 would be to release if publicly and widely.<p>The more people play with it, the more they are used to it and the less likely to be fooled by it. In addition, large corporations and nation states have the money and access to talent that they can build and train these models. Thus if you hide it, you are just making the technology more potent in the hands of the very people who have the most incentive to use it to manipulate people.

I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen so many exclamation marks on a single Twitter timeline.

I can&#x27;t believe I have to login to use it, I also can&#x27;t believe the generated content goes through automated content moderation before I get to see it.<p>The state of affairs in open AI software (the concept) is shameful.

Should add: &quot;Google researcher: ...&quot; to the title.

I’m old and can’t parse the title. What’s the problem?

Why does so much of this moralizing crap seem come from employees of a certain company whose core revenue model has so many moral issues to criticize?<p>Like, &quot;Hey, I work at ExxonMobil, let me tell you how you eating that hamburger is destroying the planet&quot;