[HN Gopher] LAION, a high school teacher's free image database, ...
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LAION, a high school teacher's free image database, powers AI
unicorns
Author : RafelMri
Score : 332 points
Date : 2023-04-24 09:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| chwa982 wrote:
| [flagged]
| sailorganymede wrote:
| Sounds like the website you are currently on does the trick.
| dvt wrote:
| > Within a matter of months, lawsuits had been filed against
| generative AI companies Stability AI and Midjourney for copyright
| infringement [...] But these aren't Schuhmann's concerns. He just
| wants to set the data free.
|
| Maybe it _should be_ one of his concerns? I 'm not sure how _he_
| would feel about someone stealing his work and commercializing
| it.
| vasco wrote:
| He is not commercializing it as far as I know.
| dvt wrote:
| "Hey man, I just make the meth, I don't sell it."
|
| The point I'm trying to get across is that, at least to me,
| it seems incredibly irresponsible and borderline unethical.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Depending on views about drugs and personal liberty, that
| statement may be neither irresponsible nor unethical.
| moomoo3000 wrote:
| These are all images that were posted to the internet
| right? That place where anyone can download things freely?
| dvt wrote:
| > That place where anyone can download things freely?
|
| This is _incredibly_ reductive. Property rights exist on
| the internet, too. Like how someone can own a domain name
| or the copyright to a photograph or short story.
| vasco wrote:
| So say what you think is unethical, don't stretch the truth
| just because you think you are right. He is not
| commercializing anything and kept his job as a high-school
| teacher.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Anything can be misused. The person who intentionally and
| willfully misuses it is the problem, not the existence of the
| thing per se.
| layer8 wrote:
| LAION doesn't publish the images, only the metadata with links
| to the original image locations. Arguably, the alt text
| contained in the metadata is still subject to copyright.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Maybe it should be one of his concerns? I'm not sure how he
| would feel about someone stealing his work and commercializing
| it
|
| Covered in the article, his work is being commercialized and
| profited from:
|
| > Schuhmann hasn't profited from LAION and says he isn't
| interested in doing so. "I'm still a high school teacher. I
| have rejected job offers from all different kinds of companies
| because I wanted this to stay independent,"
| netuffresche wrote:
| If someone is interested, I interviewed him recently. The
| interview is in german, though.
|
| https://entwickler.de/machine-learning/laion-open-source-ai
| w-m wrote:
| Thank you! The Bloomberg article piqued my interest, but it is
| actually very light on the details of the LAION project - it
| quickly moved into the same old license and bias discussions
| and left me wanting. Your interview is much more interesting,
| it's great to learn a more about the person behind it and his
| motivations.
| netuffresche wrote:
| Thanks! Really happy to hear that. He's a very fascinating
| guy and LAION is an awesome project, eventhough the
| discussion about copyright and data sets is important.
| lisasays wrote:
| _For his part, Schuhmann hasn't profited from LAION and says he
| isn't interested in doing so. "I'm still a high school teacher. I
| have rejected job offers from all different kinds of companies
| because I wanted this to stay independent," he said._
|
| Brave is this man for going against the current Zeitgeist (and
| the obvious financial temptations).
| ftxbro wrote:
| Something about this reminds me a lot of Michael Hart and Project
| Gutenberg.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| One could also write an image crawler to execute from AWS.
|
| The key is finding quality source material.
|
| It may become necessary to:
|
| 1. Fly drones around to gather data in the world at present time
|
| 2. Direct humans to take high-quality photos of particular
| subjects. Fiverr for photography
| ramraj07 wrote:
| You mean like what google did with street view and convincing
| everyone to upload their photos on to maps?
| lmpdev wrote:
| Like that but properly organised and with higher quality
| imagery
|
| I've been wanting this for quite sometime
| Tepix wrote:
| Or like Mapillary (bought by Facebook, but with a liberal
| license still)
| bradgessler wrote:
| This will be the new captcha challenge--"take a picture of 14
| crosswalks"
|
| It will send you a link to an app that only runs on an iPhone
| so it can verify you actually took the pics from the phone.
| moffkalast wrote:
| _takes pictures of a screen with the phone_
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| That would not be a11y friendly!
| logi2mus wrote:
| Why exactly, they should know how to use crosswalks by that
| age.
| newswasboring wrote:
| a11y means accessibility. Apparently this is a common
| enough jargon in that part of the industry.
| Maken wrote:
| Is the jargon going too far?
| wongarsu wrote:
| I the j4n going too far? English always had a dislike for
| long words, so turning long and s11d words into shorter
| forms is the next logical step in l6e evolution.
| Certainly beats having to spell w12e sauce in its
| entirety /s
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| At least w12e is easier to pronounce:-)
| Maken wrote:
| At some point LLMs will have a easier time understanding
| English than actual human beings.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Expecting people to know this is going too far. I mean
| usually the acronym gives a hint, this is just straight
| up medieval druid vibes. "Oh the field which begins with
| a followed by our savior's pious 11 letters and then a y"
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| Neither are current captchas: they're ina11 to non-US
| residents (/former residents).
|
| (We don't have 'crosswalks'. 'Fire hydrants' don't look
| like that. 'Parking meters' don't look like that (or any
| one standardised thing really). Traffic lights don't look
| like that and how much of them am I meant to click anyway.
| School buses don't look like that. Trucks don't look like
| that. I'm sure there are more.)
| wongarsu wrote:
| And often it's even more subtle. Apparently Americans
| don't consider pedestrian lights part of the traffic
| lights. And apparently they only mark the actual light
| assembly, not the structure holding them up.
|
| Lot's of things where you might think you know what
| you're doing, but are actually doing it wrong because you
| lack cultural context..
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| That doesn't seem like cultural context at all. That just
| seems like the arbitrary decision of the person who
| created the captchas. I am, presumably, from the same
| culture as them and would have agreed that pole was part
| of the traffic light.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I know most of HN lives downtown but not everyone is near
| a crosswalk. And then there are blind people, etc.
| OJFord wrote:
| I assume non-downtown US residents are still
| significantly more aware of the term, what it is, and
| what it looks like.
|
| I'd heard it in films before captcha, but had to guess
| it's the zebra crossing looking (the meaning is different
| though, I understand) things. Now it's just something I'm
| familiar with because of captcha, even more so 'parking
| meters'. Which is just weird, why do I have to learn
| something mundane about a specific country in order to
| prove I'm human and allowed to use a global website?
| TACIXAT wrote:
| I've built a site to pay people for images and annotations. [1]
| I'm trying to onboard my first paid users right now. The plan
| is to build out a high quality 50k image license plate
| recognition dataset as a proof of concept.
|
| Right now we own all of the datasets on the site and the idea
| is to license them out to companies while making them available
| to researchers under a non-commercial license. The market might
| take it a different direction to be more of a marketplace or
| Github style hosting. Email in bio if anyone wants to chat
| about this.
|
| Also, if anyone wants to get paid 10 cents an image to take
| pictures of North American license plates, get in touch. Need
| about 1000 from each state. It's probably below most people's
| pay grade on here but there is a whole reverse bidding system,
| so you can always bid higher than 10 cents. Some user studies
| with a shared screen would be super helpful as well.
|
| 1. https://mekabytes.com
| kennyloginz wrote:
| Wow, interesting project. Not sure how many people you can
| entice into providing 10k photos of license plates, firearms,
| and children in pools. I kid, but are you building an alert
| system for a superhero?
| TACIXAT wrote:
| Ha! It is a bit public safety focused right now. The first
| two I will really build out (read: pay people to help with)
| are license plate recognition and vehicle make/model/year
| identification. I think those have a decent market.
|
| The firearms one is tricky and I'm not sure it will ever be
| licensed commercially since we don't own the footage that
| the images are taken from. Valuable dataset in terms of
| what it could provide though, like an early warning system
| for active shooters.
|
| Some day I'll have enough free time and just make a
| billiards dataset to help me find shots.
| mikecoles wrote:
| Unattended security gates at a local campground are being
| used to gather data. To get access to the campground, you
| have to provide your plate number, vehicle make & model,
| and vehicle color. The gate only checks for the plate
| number, but the images captured can be used to build out
| a vehicle make/model ML model.
|
| Maybe partner with such a system to gather your data?
|
| I have several thousand images of vehicles on the roadway
| and parking lots that I used to understand the backend ML
| of an ALPR system. Selecting cameras was the most
| difficult part of the project. I did not attempt to
| determine the make/model. My patience for labeling had
| worn too thin.
|
| Overall, as invasive as ALPR system are, the cat has long
| left the bag. I doubt the cat will ever return.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Have a good look at privacy laws in the states/countries
| of your users, in some things like this may be against
| the law or subject to restrictions. See:
|
| https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-
| communication/automated-...
| TACIXAT wrote:
| Thank you! That's honestly very helpful.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You're welcome & much good luck with your project!
| angrais wrote:
| What is the cost for each dataset for commercial uses?
| TACIXAT wrote:
| We haven't figured out commercial pricing yet. It may be a
| scale based on company revenue. Targeting bigger businesses
| though, it will be less than it would cost to develop the
| model independently, but likely trying to target low 5
| figures.
|
| The datasets are also available and a non-commercial
| Creative Commons license. You can pay $5 for a download and
| rehost it elsewhere, or just wait for me to upload it to
| Kaggle or Hugging Face
| dahwolf wrote:
| "Also, if anyone wants to get paid 10 cents an image to take
| pictures of North American license plates, get in touch."
|
| Your blatant disregard for privacy is shocking, but perhaps
| unsurprising in the field. I guess you also didn't through
| the enormous risks for the photographer.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Hey there, just checked out the site and signed up. I'm not
| seeing anything about how to get paid for uploads. Can you
| provide some direction here? Thanks!
| TACIXAT wrote:
| It is a little hidden still. On your profile page there
| should be a sign up link that will take you to Stripe. Feel
| free to email me. I will post two solicitations tomorrow,
| one for annotation work and one for plate photographs.
|
| It is restricted to US only right now (Stripe setting) but
| I will change that if there is non-US interest and the
| country is supported.
|
| I've only run through the whole process once so hopefully
| there are no hiccups. Thank you!
| kleiba wrote:
| _The group used raw HTML code collected by the California
| nonprofit Common Crawl to locate images around the web and
| associate them with descriptive text. It does not use any manual
| or human curation._
|
| Does the Common Crawl data already take care of the copyright
| issue? Or else how does the LAION crawler deal with that problem?
|
| I mean, it's not too hard to write an image crawler. Also,
| scaling it up it a bit of a challenge, but it's a technical one.
| But the real difficulty is how to deal with all the legal strings
| attached...
| nprateem wrote:
| It's not really a difficulty though is it, for VC funded
| unicorns who ask forgiveness and move fast. When the law
| catches up, if ever, they'll pay a slap on the wrist while
| sitting on their superyachts
| angrais wrote:
| Less than 0.01% of the 5.8 billion images have an associated
| license. This license was taken from the webpage so cannot be
| trusted.
| layer8 wrote:
| LAION doesn't publish the images, only the metadata, which
| includes the original image URLs. Anyone who wants to make use
| of the image set has to re-download the images from the
| original sources [0], and is then liable for actually using the
| images. Arguably, the alt text contained in the metadata is
| still subject to copyright though.
|
| [0] see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35681085
| XorNot wrote:
| This is the most commonly misunderstood characteristic of
| LAION, and I find that alarming because it feels like it just
| plain means a lot of people don't understand how the internet
| actually works.
|
| Which is not surprising but guys, it's _everywhere_ it 's
| also not optional to understand this.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| Yet, what LAION is doing appears to be somewhat obvious. We
| are a non-profit and not publishing the images seems like
| hiding behind technicalities.
| XorNot wrote:
| What do you think they're doing?
| dahwolf wrote:
| We understand it just fine. Us internet people do free
| labor, then others take it and monetize it.
| XorNot wrote:
| Seems like you both don't understand LAION and don't
| understand hyperlinking.
| slow_typist wrote:
| Arguably, a short alt text does not meet the threshold of
| originality under most jurisdictions. See
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
| Borrible wrote:
| Well, at least one content producer is pissed about it.
|
| Sorry, only in German:
|
| https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e...
|
| And translated via Google translate:
|
| https://www-alltageinesfotoproduzenten-de.translate.goog/202...
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| After reading it, it seems that LAION is merely doing the
| dirty work (going as far as intimidating the creators of the
| materials they use) so that other companies can utilize
| copyrighted material without taking too much risk. Not sure
| if this teacher is a hero...
| slow_typist wrote:
| According to Christoph Schumann there is legislation in Europe
| that allows the usage of crawled data for public research
| institutions and nonprofit organisations. LAION is a registered
| german nonprofit (gemeinnutziger Verein).
|
| Source: https://entwickler.de/machine-learning/laion-open-
| source-ai (found in another post).
| gorbachev wrote:
| Commercial entities are using the data, however. I'm pretty
| sure the German legislation didn't mean that to be allowed.
| slow_typist wrote:
| Sure. But that is not in LAIONs responsibility. They
| provide URIs to images and the corresponding alt texts.
| epups wrote:
| I wonder how it came to be that such a critical component of a
| multi billion industry relies on something so amateurish as
| LAION. This is no offense to the author at all, who organised a
| gigantic effort which we now see is very valuable. But I would
| imagine a company like Google could do a much better job in no
| time, simply due to expertise and resources.
|
| I guess the answer is legal liability.
| dahwolf wrote:
| "I guess the answer is legal liability."
|
| Indeed. The answer is in the article. He gets offered jobs all
| the time, but nobody offers to buy the data itself. Clearly
| because nobody wants to own it, it's all plausible deniability.
| Maken wrote:
| Forever relevant: https://xkcd.com/2347/
| lisasays wrote:
| By all indications, it's definitely a solid engineering
| project. On what basis should we deride it as "amateurish"?
|
| Because it originates in the public sector? As opposed to the
| private sector (where, as we know, everything is done to the
| highest possible engineering standards)?
| epups wrote:
| I know the word sounds demeaning, and I didn't mean to
| criticise in on technical grounds. I find it an extremely
| impressive project.
|
| I meant that it does not have the refinement you would expect
| for such a critical tool. A substantial portion of LAION is
| composed of duplicates. If you have ever browsed it, you will
| find that many annotations are quite basic and in some cases
| incorrect. In ChatGPT's case we know there was a small army
| of people going through their dataset to filter and refine
| issues that are presumably similar to those.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Who is not to say google et al doesn't have an in house
| army that re-annotates images with a low score and store it
| in a parallel dataset?
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Text-to-visual LMs are making children's book illustrators go the
| way of harpsichord tuners and whale oil hunters.
| milofeynman wrote:
| Is there an example of a generated children's book that
| maintains style throughout?
| riffraff wrote:
| This was always possible, I own multiple books for kids which
| have obviously been made with random clip art and illustrations
| which are badly paired.
|
| But _proper_ illustration is so much better, I doubt it will go
| away.
|
| Perhaps a better simile is hand made clothing: you can get mass
| produced stuff, or you can get small batch, or you can get
| handmade. There is a market for all of those.
| PeterisP wrote:
| _Proper_ illustration is so expensive that in most cases
| people are tolerating it because the alternatives are either
| very horrible (random clip art) or to make do without
| illustrations.
|
| If digital tools enable _decent_ clipart that can be at least
| _somewhat_ paired to the content, that will take over most of
| the market, because then it 'll be just somewhat worse than
| proper illustration while being dirt cheap in comparison.
| ukuina wrote:
| The market for all of those is ridiculously lopsided, though.
| That doesn't bode well for illustrators, especially the ones
| that pour love into crafting every drawing and sketch to make
| it as good as it could be.
| totetsu wrote:
| If you take the point of view, that children's media is only
| for kids, so quality doesn't really matter. The best children's
| book authors and illustrators are ones who see children as the
| most important audience of all and deserving of the most
| careful work.
| ftxbro wrote:
| Maybe the idea is that most children's books are illustrated,
| compared to other books.
| p-e-w wrote:
| Except that the better outputs from the better Stable
| Diffusion models make 99% of professional illustrators look
| like they're drawing stick figures by comparison.
|
| If you still believe that "AI generated = bad quality", you
| haven't seen some of the stuff that has popped up lately. SD
| is still new, so understandably it's taking a while for
| people to figure out how to use it properly, but some users
| are clearly getting the hang of it now, and the results are
| mind-blowing.
| totetsu wrote:
| I am not talking about visual wow factor quality. I would
| love link to my instagram of amazing dalle2 and SD
| generated images, but I like to keep my HN account clean of
| personal info. [1 like this] Children don't care about
| that, they consume images as a way of creating and
| expanding their inner world and their understanding the
| outer world. A stick figure that captures something real to
| life in an way a child can recognize and be excited by is
| much 'quality' image for children's media than a 'award
| winning picture of a cute robot holding a flower 4k
| documentary footage' descended from a random distribution
| of Gaussian noise. The Gernative AIs we have today don't
| make things like this story by Joy Cowley with these kind
| of illustrations.[2]
|
| [1] https://pasteboard.co/VG6XNvbeC4gA.png
|
| [2] https://www.slideserve.com/herbst/story-by-joy-cowley-
| illust...
| riffraff wrote:
| Can you get SD to do something like Richard Scarry's
| Busytown?
|
| I'm asking sincerely, if we can I'll be genuinely
| impressed.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| you could if you fine tune a model of create a LoRA on
| busytown work. This would take under a day.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I've tried once with MJ and it looks OK. I'm not even
| surprised anymore.
|
| The devil, though, is in the details.
|
| It's hard to control the outputs. The scene will look 80%
| OK, but then you want to add some cat somewhere and that
| won't be trivial (at the moment). There are already a lot
| of impressive tools to help you out, like ControlNet, but
| it's a bit difficult still.
|
| You also have to do cleanup, because some random animal
| in the background of the illustration will be horribly
| mangled. This all basically requires you to actually be a
| (digital) artist to fix properly. Again, for now.
|
| Edit: I wanted to add that this, to me, is similar to AI
| coding. On a good day, it might be 80% OK, but you
| actually need to be a programmer to catch its lies and/or
| incompetenties.
| riffraff wrote:
| > This all basically requires you to actually be a
| (digital) artist to fix properly. Again, for now.
|
| right, this is my impression of the "graphic ai
| revolution": it will be a boon for actual digital artists
| that can take the output and refine it, much like Copilot
| can help programmers while not replacing them. for now,
| anyway.
| p-e-w wrote:
| My impression has been that Stable Diffusion has
| outclassed the vast majority of digital artists from day
| one.
|
| The only reason people feel otherwise is because when you
| look at human-made digital art online, you tend to only
| see the best of the best of the best. The one-in-a-
| thousand artists who make it to the DeviantArt or
| ArtStation frontpages.
|
| But most artists aren't anywhere near as good as those
| few geniuses, and neither are they as good as what Stable
| Diffusion generates.
|
| So my prediction is that 99% of digital artists are
| essentially obsolete today, and the remaining 1% will
| become obsolete some time in the next 3-5 years.
| SanderNL wrote:
| It's great, but I think reliability is as big a problem
| there as it is in coding. It's hard to control the
| output.
|
| I won't go into the various problems these tools have,
| like them ignoring my instructions if they are outside
| what 90% of the population is doing, because I think they
| can and will be solved to various degrees eventually.
|
| But the bar will raise. The quality that customers expect
| will start rising. Eventually the level of control and
| quality that is demanded will again only be adequatedly
| matched by people we usually call "artists". Sure, I -
| some scumbag programmer - can create some fancy generic
| shots today for a generic company blog post and for now
| that _is_ impressive, but in the long term this won 't
| cut it.
|
| Folks will want highly fine-tuned specific imagery
| trained on company stuff or whatever. Branding will have
| to match exactly. The complexity of the design will
| explode. Good taste and raw visual skill, not to mention
| creativity - being an "artist" - will win and the average
| dude will not have the proclivity to keep up those
| skills. I think it's more than holding a pencil and being
| good at drawing lines.
|
| I _do_ think the raw skills of "holding a pencil" and
| such is becoming obsolete. That's like having good
| "punching card" skills. However, knowing what to "punch"
| is a timeless skill or at least a good part of it is and
| it's easy to adapt to a new era if needed. Punching code,
| typing code, selecting code-snippets from AI, it's
| different for sure, but the underlying high-level skills
| are adaptable and useful. I think the same holds for
| artists.
| raincole wrote:
| > today
|
| More like yesterday, to be honest.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > make 99% of professional illustrators look like they're
| drawing stick figures by comparison.
|
| I feel the opposite to be the case -- people are feeding
| prompts and sketches and AI generated RGBD images as base,
| and another RGB for style transfer source, all for just one
| image. If anything, it seems, it's becoming a tool
| increasingly limited to professionals.
| grumbel wrote:
| While it's true that you need to feed some source images
| into the AI to get good results, what you feed into them
| can be pretty arbitrary and low quality, as all you are
| really doing is providing the AI with information about
| positioning and composition that can't be expressed with
| a text prompt. It's pretty much the "How To Draw an Owl"
| meme with AI doing the last step.
| p-e-w wrote:
| You can get amazing results without doing any of that,
| and I can promise you that most of the people posting AI
| art on DeviantArt etc. aren't "professionals".
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| So is mass printing
| prepend wrote:
| But are also leading to more illustrations in children's books
| and more children's books.
|
| I think it's changing the job from pen and paper
| (allegorically) to a prompt wrangler who gets the image right
| for the editor or author. Kind of like how seo optimization
| became a job and didn't even exist 30 years ago.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > To build LAION, founders scraped visual data from companies
| such as Pinterest, Shopify and Amazon Web Services -- which did
| not comment on whether LAION's use of their content
|
| Pinterest, "their content"... not sure I agree with that but if
| we're going to use the logic that things saved to Pinterest by
| it's users becomes Pinterest's content then isn't LAION doing the
| same thing and the content becomes LAION's content when it's
| saved to their database of images...
| mcv wrote:
| If LAION republishes people's copyrighted content, that sounds
| like a pretty blatant copyright violation (edit: it's not; see
| below). Sounds like all the artists unhappy that their art is
| being used to train these AI systems, should be talking to
| LAION to have their content removed from the dataset.
|
| Edit: Apparently LAION doesn't republish the content, only the
| metadata, so it's not a copyright violation. Still, it would be
| nice if got permission or offered a way for artists to be
| excluded from the data set.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > Still, it would be nice if got permission or offered a way
| for artists to be excluded from the data set.
|
| If artists don't want their work to impact the world, they're
| free to keep it to themselves.
|
| This whole discussion that we should allow individual artists
| to opt out of AI art through contracts or some other legal
| vehicle is a non starter, because it'll be impossible to
| administrate and enforce at scale, and there's too much
| incentive and ability for big tech to just ignore them and
| steamroll artists. They aren't a unified bloc, and even if
| they were how would they ever compete against big tech?
|
| So what to do? Looking at productivity gains over the
| decades, it's not clear why we are still working as hard as
| we are. It's long overdue that productivity gains should come
| back to the people. Maybe "artist" shouldn't be a job title
| associated with profit/income seeking. If you want to be an
| artist, maybe society can support that.
|
| Maybe instead of using all those productivity gains to do
| more more more, we can just work less for the same. Because
| it seems to me the more we work, the more _they_ get richer.
| What if instead, they didn 't get so rich, and we gave that
| money to artists in the form of grants, like we do for
| scientists. You do some art, apply for some grants, and you
| get some money to do more art. It'll all be public domain,
| anyone can use it, and big business gets to make a profit on
| it just like with scientific advancements (I have issues
| about that, but at least there's precedent).
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I think there's plenty of room for a finer-grained
| permission framework and clear demand for one. I give it
| about a year, maybe 1.5 for all the interested parties and
| advocates to align behind a standard and make it happen via
| big-company enforcement and the occasional copyrught
| lawsuit (or, more commonly, enforcement via TOS).
|
| Once that happens, of course, the "black market" data
| aggregators won't care, but they're small and their product
| can't be used by legitimate channels so it can't compete in
| the mainstream market of ideas. What capital will do to
| screw over artists though is... Pay them. Once a framework
| for AI seed rights-granting is in place, a hundred or a
| thousand legit artists can produce enough AI seed-feed to
| legally supplant the work of hundreds of thousands.
|
| There will still be room for the artist-as-celebrity with a
| unique style that makes their art worth owning as much for
| the fact that it came from them as for the content of the
| canvas or the sculpture, but a huge, guaranteed-work,
| bread-and-butter space for the visual artist, advertising
| and entertainment media asset creation, will dry up as
| companies backfill their art needs with functionally-free-
| to-them mass-generated close-enough assets (advertising in
| particular is going to be full of this... Remember when
| "head first" photos of people were a thing for awhile? Look
| forward to trends like that, over and over again, forever).
| ModernMech wrote:
| > all the interested parties and advocates to align
| behind a standard
|
| This is the thing that will never happen, because all
| artists are interested parties, and as I said, they are
| not a unified bloc. So whatever solution big companies
| come up with for themselves, we all know ahead of time
| that they will 1) overwhelmingly benefit big corporations
| and 2) but insufficient to address artist concerns. When
| they coalesce around whatever standards they end up with,
| artists will still largely be making the same complaints.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Too true. I should probably have said "All parties with
| enough political and capital clout to make trouble for
| other parties." The disorganized masses are disorganized
| and usually don't end up with a seat at the table if they
| don't organize.
| archerx wrote:
| Why does Pinterest get away with republishing people's
| content? Shouldn't artist be suing Pinterest for its blatant
| copyright violations?
| jimbokun wrote:
| I assume they have all users click on a license that has a
| clause allowing them to use all images uploaded however
| they want, buried deep within the text somewhere.
| sharemywin wrote:
| you have to use a section 230 DCMA take down notice if the
| user post your stuff with out permission.
|
| https://policy.pinterest.com/en/copyright
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| You can read here(in german): https://www.alltageinesfotoprod
| uzenten.de/2023/02/20/laion-v...
|
| that the non-profit LAION is going as far as intimidating the
| creators of the images they used.
|
| They don't publish the image, yes, and that is also their
| reasoning. However, in my opinion, the intention behind all
| of this seems obvious. They circumvent copyright claims by
| being a non-profit and not publishing, but with the clear
| intent that the image will be used to train some system
| further down the road. LAION appears to be a key player in
| how these text-to-image models dodge the copyright bullet.
| antiterra wrote:
| > They don't publish the image, yes, and that is also their
| reasoning.
|
| No, their reasoning is that they only keep a _link_ to the
| image so there's nothing to remove.
|
| A more interesting angle would be copyrightable ALT tags in
| the form of poems or other creative content. But, the cat
| is already out of the bag as it's probably easy enough to
| strip poetry or other copyrightable out of alt tags with
| the technology we've got at this point.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| > No, their reasoning is that they only keep a link to
| the image so there's nothing to remove.
|
| I'm well aware of it, and that's also what I wanted to
| say. However, as I mentioned, the dataset with the links
| (to copyrighted material) is provided for machine
| learning purposes. Saying "We only provide links" is a
| lazy excuse from a guy with a smirking face.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Intimidating? They mention that if you sue them on
| copyright ground when they do nothing copyright related,
| they are able to claim damages. Which seems pretty fair, as
| the claims by the photographers are clearly in bad faith.
|
| Links are still mostly legal in Germany, if the link is to
| something which is not, it's a different situation and
| different from "hey, I own the copyright of my images,
| don't link to them!"
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| We all know the purpose for which the images linked in
| the dataset will be used. "We are a non-profit
| organization and provide only a link" is akin to taking
| people for fools. Why can't these systems be trained
| exclusively on images for which people have given consent
| or for which money has been paid?
| Semaphor wrote:
| > is akin to taking people for fools.
|
| I very much disagree.
| Filligree wrote:
| > Still, it would be nice if got permission or offered a way
| for artists to be excluded from the data set.
|
| It obeys robots.txt, and the user-agent is documented.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| robots.txt generally only addresses permission to crawl;
| not permission to reproduce the content.
| tyingq wrote:
| >Apparently LAION doesn't republish the content, only the
| metadata
|
| _" LAION datasets are simply indexes to the internet, i.e.
| lists of URLs to the original images together with the ALT
| texts found linked to those images."_
|
| I'm surprised link rot doesn't make this a big problem.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| There are many twitter datasets that are already 50% gone.
| It's very bad for reproducibility
| __alexs wrote:
| There is an T&C agreement between Pinterest and its users.
| There is no T&Cs agreement between between LAION and
| Pinterest's users.
| debugnik wrote:
| There's also no agreement between Pinterest and the actual
| copyright owners of most of their content, so much reposted
| art without even credit or a link to the source.
|
| Plus, LAION is just an index, whereas Pinterest actually
| hosts it.
| [deleted]
| dahwolf wrote:
| Worse, Pinterest even ranks highly in Google, often higher
| than the original.
|
| If you'd now go and do the same, create a website that
| rehosts known content, Google will simply delist you.
|
| But magically, not for Pinterest, they get a boost instead.
| I've always wondered what kind of under the table deal
| makes this possible.
| [deleted]
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| It's copyright infringement all the way down.
| GaggiX wrote:
| >Tools like Dall-E-2 and Stable Diffusion have been criticized
| for reproducing racial stereotypes even when a text prompt
| doesn't imply the subject's race. Such biases were why Google
| decided not to release Imagen, which had been trained on LAION.
|
| This is so ingenuous and naive to think that the reason Google
| didn't release Imagen is because of racial stereotypes.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| It's what Google claimed and thus the eternally true correct
| reason and its very problematic if you think otherwise
| astrange wrote:
| If there's a reason Google doesn't want to talk about, it's
| that the biggest legal risk of AI image generation is that it
| can be used for revenge porn and CSAM.
|
| I don't think it's problematic to be worried about that!
| anonylizard wrote:
| The biggest legal risk, empirically, is massive copyright
| lawsuits. The AI art models are rapidly eliminating most
| artist/photography jobs.
|
| Revenge porn and CSAM are trivially solved by community
| moderation methods like Midjourney, simply force every
| generation to be tied to a paid account, and made in the
| public eye (posted on discord channels).
|
| So in reality, its not Google's risk conservatism, its
| Google's utter lack of imagination and creativity, and the
| lack of organisational incentive for anything other than ad
| money.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| You realize stable diffusion has been out for 6 months
| and is more powerful than midjourney?
| janekm wrote:
| Was, when it came out, since then MJ have released 3 new
| models (plus variants) and most users assess the MJv5
| model as more powerful. Of course new SD models are also
| on the horizon...
| astrange wrote:
| > Of course new SD models are also on the horizon...
|
| SDXL is available at https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/ though
| they say they're going to release more variants.
|
| I think ControlNet is a lot more interesting than just
| "better tuned models"; it means there's no line between
| creating something yourself and asking an AI to do it
| anymore.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Maybe in some technical sense but in practice the
| majority of quality (subjective) work I see shared on
| Twitter is Midjourney backed. Which is crazy to me
| because I don't think I could design a more frustrating
| interface than Discord.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Midjourney gives you good images with near zero work. SD
| makes you work for the output but gives you FAR greater
| control but also needing to be technically skilled, and
| have pricey hardware. Given this, it is easy to
| understand why the majority of what you see is done in
| midjourney.
| SanderNL wrote:
| My god, sorry for the dumb post, but SD is only _months_
| old? It already feels like it has been around forever.
| This space is insane.
| astrange wrote:
| > The AI art models are rapidly eliminating most
| artist/photography jobs.
|
| Automation is associated with increased employment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
|
| > Revenge porn and CSAM are trivially solved by community
| moderation methods like Midjourney
|
| Please don't go around saying things like entire safety
| departments being trivially solved by anything. Community
| moderation isn't a legal solution to CSAM, it's arguable
| the community users are committing crimes by looking at
| it. (Extra difficult because this depends on the
| country.) And they're certainly not getting healthcare
| benefits for it, so they could probably sue you.
|
| This is the reason they're on Discord though, it's
| because Discord handles the legal compliance for these
| things.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| They could just filter it like Midjourney or DALL-E.
| astrange wrote:
| How do they know they can "just" do something that came
| out a year after they invented Imagen?
|
| Especially when getting it wrong once might mean Europe
| makes AI illegal. Making things illegal is their favorite
| hobby.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| Midjourney and DALL-E were both announced and in closed
| beta a month _before_ Imagen was announced, with filters
| already in place.
| andresgottlieb wrote:
| "such biases"
| klodolph wrote:
| Google previously had problems with Google Photos categorizing
| dark-skinned people as "gorillas" or something like that. This
| would show up when you were searching for photos in your
| personal Google Photos account. Everyone talked about it.
| Nobody wants to release a product like that. Removing bias is
| hard; you can't just decide to get an unbiased training set or
| something magical like that.
|
| It is NOT surprising that larger companies would behave with an
| abundance of caution. Leave it to the startups to rush in head-
| first, cause a bunch of problems, make a cool product, get a
| consent decree, and capture the market. Large companies that
| act that way get PR problems and lawsuits.
| inciampati wrote:
| And bearded men became "pets"
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| Except they did rush their oh so dangerous language model out
| when push came to shove - turns out it just sucks in
| comparison. Frankly, I expect something similar for image
| generation. For all the good research Google's labs do,
| they're not great at turning it into an actual product.
| Ethics just seems like a fig leaf.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| The ethics team has the unenviable in a corporate
| environment role of being "no" by default gatekeepers. This
| is likely why the responsible ai groups, focused on
| mitigation have survived while the ethics groups, focused
| on systemic issues, have shrunk.
| smeagull wrote:
| Is that a bias? or do those images just look more like those
| categories at the pixel level?
|
| There is a reason those words are the ones chosen by racists
| in the first place. Not just because they're hurtful, but
| because there is an objective similarity that makes the rest
| of the comparison seem, however shallowly, to validate their
| views.
|
| Removing bias with censorship at the training set level is
| silly, and will likely hamper the AI's performance. Better to
| train the AI to not produce problematic output at the higher
| level, and ensure class membership in the training data is
| representative.
| prepend wrote:
| > and ensure class membership in the training data is
| representative.
|
| This seems like the most productive focus area. Add in more
| variety in the training images and output should get closer
| to representing the global population.
| anonylizard wrote:
| In retrospect, those concerns were pretty much drummed up by
| the "AI ethics" people, who needed an easy topic to
| demonstrate their importance.
|
| When actually powerful AIs got released, the 'bias' angle got
| overwhelmed 100x by the "trained on copyright data" and "Are
| we going to lose our jobs" angle. Your average black artist
| doesn't care if SD defaults to drawing white people, because
| A: he cares about not being able to draw for a living,
| permanently, 100 times as much. B: He can always add 'dark
| skinned' to his prompt
|
| The bias problem is also relatively easy to solve (Midjourney
| has already made massive improvements), while the
| copyright/job loss problem is extremely hard.
|
| The AI ethics people have had shockingly little to say on
| copyright/job loss issues. Which is why they got fired en
| masse.
|
| Large organisations systemically overestimated the risks from
| bias, and underestimated the actual AI risks that society
| actually cares about. I think the answer is also simple,
| because accused of racism, will cost any executive in a large
| company their job. Being accused of automating millions of
| jobs, will earn them prestige and a promotion. Smaller
| companies can ignore those accusations because they aren't
| vulnerable to activist pressure, they answer only to their
| customers.
| klodolph wrote:
| > The bias problem is also relatively easy to solve
| (Midjourney has already made massive improvements), while
| the copyright/job loss problem is extremely hard.
|
| It only seems easy to solve on the surface, it's a deep
| problem. It's also not just the bias thing, Bing and
| ChatGPT have been saying some truly unhinged things.
|
| > I think the answer is also simple, because accused of
| racism, will cost any executive in a large company their
| job.
|
| It takes more than an accusation, otherwise you could go
| around accusing executives you don't like of racism and
| getting them fired.
|
| Ethics is a tenuous job position at best, even in a large
| company. It's seen as a cost center. I don't think there's
| much to read into why AI ethicists would get laid off.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Bing and GPT's 'unhinged' comments are not a result of
| bias, an AI wanting to escape won't be fixed if you
| magically fed it antifa approved only data. That's
| systemically different from the discrimination issue
| drummed up earlier.
|
| Also, we are talking about social and business impact
| here. Its now proven that vast majority of society cares
| about job loss 100x more than bias. For a research field
| that focuses on social impacts of AI, its damning they
| have little to say on this area.
| klodolph wrote:
| > an AI wanting to escape won't be fixed if you magically
| fed it antifa approved only data
|
| If these are the sentences you're producing, then maybe
| you should take a look at what kind of data is being fed
| into your neural network. Like, where are you getting
| this antifa stuff?
|
| > its damning they have little to say on this area.
|
| One of the problems you need to solve into get good AI-
| generated text is that you need to resolve pronouns. It's
| also a problem in this sentence, because I don't know
| where the antecedent for "they" is.
| fortran77 wrote:
| The person you were replying to, while making a
| provocative statement, wasn't personally attacking
| anyone. You are. And that's not nice.
| eropple wrote:
| Going on about "antifa approved" is chud stuff that is
| employed only and specifically to normalize an _actually
| fascist_ viewpoint under the guise of talking about
| something else.
|
| Pass.
| catiopatio wrote:
| Says the person using "chud" and "fascist", which is an
| extremely strong indicator of your membership in
| terminally online antifa/leftist subculture.
| [deleted]
| klodolph wrote:
| Real talk: Someone making "provocative" statements like
| that is not making them in a vacuum. There is some kind
| of context to those statements. I want to know what kind
| of context creates the kind of garden where statements
| like that grow. Like, Antifa, a non-organization which
| has nothing to do with AI, would vet AI training data? I
| want to know where that kind of hypotheses comes from.
| hattmall wrote:
| It's not provocative, he says antifa once. It's meant as
| an example of a method of removing bias. He's saying you
| could train the AI entirely on an organizations strictly
| vetted and approved data, it could be antifa, the
| Catholic church or Coca Cola, it would still potentially
| say unhinged things even if you eliminate bias. Top many
| of these concepts are built into the language. Look at
| all the ways we use the word kill for a variety of
| topics, most being very benign, but it can be disturbing
| if the AI starts talking about killing things.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Serious question.
|
| Did you ask these black artists? Because if you didn't, you
| REALLY need to _shut it_ and keep your ideas out of their
| mouths.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Hmm, lots of downvotes, but no answer from op?
|
| If y'all need a reason why people _avoid_ this site, here
| it is.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I downvoted you because of the sentence "Because if you
| didn't, you REALLY need to shut it and keep your ideas
| out of their mouths.".
|
| The point you rised at "Serious question. Did you ask
| these black artists?" is a valid, reasonable point that
| merits discussion.
|
| But the point raised by the parent post is _also_ a
| valid, interesting point that merits discussion. And that
| point raised a valuable discussion EVEN IF they did not
| "ask these black artists", and if we put this bar and
| demand them to shut it, that's a bad thing for the
| discussion.
|
| So in my view you made an insulting demand for someone to
| "shut it" without reasonable grounds to do so, and this
| definitely deserves a downvote or five. I'm not asking
| you to "shut it", you should participate in this
| discussion, but in a civil manner that also allows posts
| like the parent post to participate in the discussion
| even if they don't meet your demands.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I _absolutely did_ because in my experience a lot of
| people do this all too often, and it warrants an
| immediate reaction. I will gladly apologize if I am
| wrong, but it seems like most people here don 't
| understand the harm that "non-black people speaking for
| black people" causes. It is SIGNIFICANTLY more rude and
| harmful than my tone here.
|
| I apologize for nothing; it is most everyone else here
| that needs to do better.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| What _really_ causes harm is when you divide people up
| into groups based on arbitrary characteristics (like skin
| color) and treat those characteristics like they 're the
| sole defining aspect of each person's identity, like
| you're doing right now.
|
| Framing this as "non-black people speaking for black
| people" carries the implicit assumption that all black
| people have the same/similar opinions; that an arbitrary
| black person _would_ be able to meaningfully "speak for
| [all] black people" in a way that an arbitrary non-black
| person can't. That's wrong.
|
| The previous commenter making an educated guess based on
| personal experience with zero concrete data points is
| only slightly worse than making that same guess based on
| one concrete data point, and neither situation would be
| justification for telling anyone to "shut it" or "do
| better" in my opinion.
| swores wrote:
| I didnt downvote you and agree with your general point,
| but consider that maybe downvotes came in due to your
| tone rather than your meaning. I actually normally would
| downvote a comment written like yours was, just less so
| when I think it's making a still-important point (but
| you're less likely to convince anyone your point is
| important if you annoy them rather than try to enlighten
| them!)
| jrm4 wrote:
| And again, as I said prior -- my tone is 100% appropriate
| compared to the genuine _offense_ likely committed above.
|
| I'm aware that normally one should keep an even tone.
| This is not one of those times and everyone _else_ here
| needs to learn that.
| swores wrote:
| Not sure what you mean "as I said prior", unless you're
| annoyed that I hadn't looked into the future to see
| replies about tone you hadn't written when I posted my
| comment...
|
| But anyway, I wasn't complaining, just pointing out my
| view (since you asked about being downvoted) that by
| using that tone, however justified it can feel to lower
| to somebody else's level, you _will_ get some people who
| take less note of what you 're actually saying or who
| downvote without thinking about the subject beyond "I
| dislike seeing that tone in HN comments".
| anonylizard wrote:
| If you want an answer, here it is.
|
| I've been monitoring artist forums since day 1 of SD's
| release. From various subreddits, to discord communities,
| to 4chan, to forums in other languages. I've never seen
| an artist complain even ONCE about bias, it is always,
| always, always, about jobs/copyright('stealing').
| jrm4 wrote:
| So you _didn 't._
|
| Again. cut it out.
| ben_w wrote:
| The question in your previous comment is totally fair,
| IMO.
|
| Trouble is, I genuinely don't know what to usefully
| suggest, because the obvious thing that comes to mind
| (focus on the actual question and strip the aggression)
| is a cliche to the point where I suspect I already know
| your response will be some form of eye-roll at my
| privilege etc.
|
| And it would be a legit response, too, given that people
| presuming to know me is annoying enough _even without it
| being a daily experience_.
| jrm4 wrote:
| It's pretty simple; many (I'm presuming) white people
| have a deeply nasty habit of conflating their own
| experiences with others because it makes sense to them,
| and THAT problem should be recognized.
|
| Just _don 't do it._ or at the very least serve it up
| with a heaping helping of "I would imagine that many..."
| so we know that this is JUST YOUR SPECULATION.
| ben_w wrote:
| It would be great if telling people that made them act
| differently; but call it Armchair Generals, or typical
| mind fallacy, or mansplaining, or Dunning-Krugering, or
| ivory-tower academics... the problem has so many forms
| and even knowing about it makes it hard to avoid in
| oneself.
| darkwater wrote:
| > Large organisations systemically overestimated the risks
| from bias, and underestimated the actual AI risks that
| society actually cares about.
|
| The point of large organizations working on
| AI/LLMs/whatever is _precisely_ to reduce labor costs by
| reducing the number of human workers and replacing them
| with AI. Why should they care about this in their
| development? (I 'm not saying it's the right thing to do,
| just stating the facts about capitalism)
|
| It is the rest of society that has the interest to fight
| those changes back.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > The bias problem is also relatively easy to solve
| (Midjourney has already made massive improvements),
|
| One thing that everyone seems to ignore these days are that
| certain settings are inherently not diverse.
|
| Until I was about 12 I didn't see non white people in real
| life except on holidays and once when I followed a relative
| who visited a refugee family.
|
| Not because we avoided them, but because they weren't
| there.
|
| Background: The country I lived as a child in didn't have a
| recent (last ~900-1000 years) history with keeping slaves
| and only recently experienced high living standards so
| there were few immigrants too.
|
| In the large district I grew up I am aware of two non
| western groups until the Balkan wars in the 90ies: a single
| middle eastern guy who I can't recall meeting and a
| southern American family who I only started meeting after I
| changed school at some point.
|
| For me, it is annoying that people insist that all pictures
| include some non-Europeans, because reality is not like
| that everwhere.
|
| I imagine the same is maybe even more true for African or
| Asian communities.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Yeah, same experience here. In Spain there is a character
| in child mythology (one of the Santa Claus analogues, who
| bring gifts from children) who is black. I remember that
| when I was a kid in the 80s, he used to be portrayed by a
| white man painted black, what Americans call "blackface",
| but for purely practical reasons: no one was black.
|
| Perhaps in big cities there were some, I don't know, but
| in many places in the country you would live your life
| without ever seeing a black person outside of TV. Just as
| you say, we didn't have a past of slavery and at that
| point the country wasn't rich enough to be an immigration
| magnet, we did have some immigration from Morocco but
| Moroccans aren't black.
|
| Now it's very different, of course, and we do have enough
| black people that that character can be portrayed more
| realistically :)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Yeah, same experience here. In Spain there is a
| character in child mythology (one of the Santa Claus
| analogues, who bring gifts from children) who is black.
|
| I would assume a somewhat _close_ analog, since Saint
| Nicholas (the _name_ source, if only a small part of the
| overall inspiration, of the "Santa Claus" figure) is, in
| one major tradition of, I believe, Italian origin,
| typically depicted as very dark-skinned (probably
| originally as a sign of foreignness rather than literal
| racial blackness; as he was geographically from Asia
| Minor and apparently of Greek ethnicity.)
| vasco wrote:
| > in Spain
|
| > Just as you say, we didn't have a past of slavery
|
| Spain (together with Portugal) were the first to invent
| "put people in boats and ship them across the Atlantic"
| type of slave trade and had large numbers of slaves in
| their colonies.
|
| And as with all other European countries that had big
| boats, they also brought many slaves back to Spain
| itself. For hundreds of years.
|
| Also calling blackface "practical because there are no
| black people around" is missing the point of why people
| don't like blackface.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Spain
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Yeah, my wording was definitely too general. There was
| slavery in Spain, my intended meaning was that there was
| no systematic enslavement of black people but there is
| definitely a chasm between what was in my brain and what
| I actually wrote, so I stand corrected.
|
| Regarding blackface, what do you suggest to do, then, if
| there is a tradition of someone portraying a character
| (whom children believe in) that happens to be black, if
| there are no black people at all to do it?
| foldr wrote:
| From the Wikipedia article linked above:
|
| >By the 16th century, 7.4 percent of the population in
| Seville, Spain were slaves. Many historians have
| concluded that Renaissance and early-modern Spain had the
| highest amount of African slaves in Europe
|
| As for what to do about blackface characters, the
| simplest solution is just to portray them differently. I
| believe this is gradually becoming a more popular option
| in the Netherlands, which has a similar problem with
| Zwarte Piet: https://raffia-
| magazine.com/2020/12/02/outgrowing-zwarte-pie...
| wizofaus wrote:
| Do you have as an example of where applying dark coloured
| make-up to anyone of a European background to make them
| look exotic/foreign doesn't also look completely
| ridiculous (and inevitably somewhat insulting)? And yes
| I'd include "Zwarte Piet". If you're putting on a
| performance where it's crucial that the audience
| identifies a particular character as African (or Moorish)
| then find a performer who can convincingly and
| respectfully pull it off sans make-up, or adapt the plot
| to what you have available. I gather that's what's done
| for the part of Othello for at least 30 years now at any
| rate.
| hoseja wrote:
| The only innovation there is the "Atlantic" part. Stop
| pretending like it was something new and uniquely
| horrible.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think the criticism here is that Iberian history is not
| uniquely _better_ rather than claiming it 's uniquely
| _worse_.
|
| (I'm British, so I'm not going to claim less-awful-than-
| thou against any nation).
| vasco wrote:
| If you agree with that innovation, you also seem to agree
| with me that the spanish were in fact involved with
| slavery, as opposed to what the person I replied to said.
| Not sure where you saw me "pretend" about anything, I
| just presented facts and a wikipedia article.
| garte wrote:
| I get what you mean and I had a similar experience
| growing up.
|
| But: I think that they were there. We just didn't see
| them a lot. They were cleaning, working in factories,
| tending gardens, looking after children etc. but they
| were not represented and thus were not visible. Of course
| they were a minority, but I'd wager they were there.
|
| Upwards social mobility and thus equality is only
| possible with recognition and representation. Without
| "being in pictures" they don't exist. That's why pictures
| should include "Non-Europeans" (this expression in itself
| is very problematic btw: there is no "European" as
| something biologically inherent in a person).
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| [dead]
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| [dead]
| Filligree wrote:
| > But: I think that they were there. We just didn't see
| them a lot. They were cleaning, working in factories,
| tending gardens, looking after children etc. but they
| were not represented and thus were not visible. Of course
| they were a minority, but I'd wager they were there.
|
| No, they genuinely weren't there. Europeans regularly
| tried to move to my hometown, got depressed/sick from the
| lack of sunlight in winter, and left. Refugees coming
| from further south had it... worse.
|
| Northern Norway isn't a place outsiders can easily move
| into. At least, not without installing grow lights in
| their living room...
| fatneckbeard wrote:
| wrong.
|
| AI bias is going to be a huge problem when morons in court
| systems start using it to convict people, or businesses use
| it for hiring decisions or firing decisions
|
| not only from the stupidity but since there are some shreds
| of the civil rights laws of the 1960s still active, AI
| companies could be liable for de-facto racist decisions
| that they informed.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >morons in court systems start using it to convict people
|
| Those "morons" are also biased.
|
| >businesses use it for hiring decisions or firing
| decisions
|
| If businesses realize the AI is doing a bad job with
| hiring unqualified people they will not use it for
| hiring.
| klodolph wrote:
| Most businesses are not very good at figuring out if they
| are hiring the right people.
| XorNot wrote:
| "Start"?[1,2]
|
| The problem I have with every discussion of AI risk is
| that people seem terminally underinformed on what is
| actual reality now, or _why_ some risk _is_ a risk.
|
| "AI" isn't a problem which can destroy the legal system:
| because it takes regular human institutions to allow such
| a miscarriage of justice. Which as noted, they started
| doing, are still doing.
|
| So you get this weird "perpetual future" perspective
| where everything "AI" is going to do is solely something
| that the technology will cause, not its users, and the
| solution is always to prevent the technology existing
| rather then fix the system - as though the US and other
| jurisdictions don't have long history's of injustice for
| all sorts of groups.
|
| The problems aren't new, and the solutions have nothing
| to do with whether you can create predictive algorithms.
| And "oh but what about the scale..." is just a
| declaration that you're aware of the problem but were
| pretty sure it wouldn't happen to you - because
| absolutely nothing else prior actually prevented it
| except the social privilege you inherited which means you
| could ignore it.
|
| [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/al
| gorithm...
|
| [2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/police-violence-
| prediction-n...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The bias problem is also relatively easy to solve
|
| No, its not.
|
| > (Midjourney has already made massive improvements)
|
| Maybe. But it hasn't come anywhere close to solving it even
| in its domain, which is probably the _least_ concerning
| domain of AI bias, and not necessarily transferrable.
|
| Actual ML systems that are deployed in production by
| governments in important roles have massive bias problems,
| as do SOTA LLMs (including, very much, GPT-4.)
|
| > The AI ethics people have had shockingly little to say on
| copyright/job loss issues.
|
| The AI ethics people have a _lot_ to say about the first
| (well "ethics of sourcing without consent" is probably more
| to the point than copyright, copyright is a component, but
| that's more legal than ethical).
|
| They have some to say about the second (well, again "job
| loss" is the wrong framing; "skill devaluation" is probably
| more on point), but that's frankly _not_ an AI issue, its
| an economic system issue and effects all technological
| change the same way. Solving _capitalism_ is mostly out of
| scope for AI ethics. EDIT: Specifically, increasing
| material output for labor input ought to be, in and of
| itself (and leaving aside ethical questions of how you do
| that, which the sourcing issue addresses) a good thing; if
| there are material losers in that, it is because the
| economic system to distribute output well, which is not an
| ethical issue of the system which enables the productivity
| gain but an ethical issue of the economic system.
|
| > Large organisations systemically overestimated the risks
| from bias
|
| No, they didn't. Those aren't even really _risks_ any more,
| they are massive current costs of existing adoptions.
|
| > and underestimated the actual AI risks that society
| actually cares about.
|
| That society (as weighted by social power) doesn't care
| about the kinds of bias problems AI manifests is exactly
| _why_ it is an ethical issue.
|
| > I think the answer is also simple, because accused of
| racism, will cost any executive in a large company their
| job.
|
| The large companies that have supplied systems which
| manifestly suffer from racial and other class biases and
| which are, in fact, being used in production to implement
| government policy around the world have _not_ lost their
| jobs, and neither have the government officials procuring
| them and responsible for the programs they are deployed in,
| so this is clearly false.
| ipaddr wrote:
| In general if no one cares does it make it an ethical
| issue? No one cares if you kill an ant. No one cares if
| you kill during a war. If what we value vs what we do
| becomes out of sync an ethical issue arises
|
| We haven't been able to remove biase in society. We just
| added more layers. The more you try to hide the truth to
| remove baise you start creating your own. The closer we
| come to accepting the truth the closer we get to solving
| bias by addressing it not erasing it.
|
| AI ethics should cover economic issues brought on by AI.
| The already discuss sociological issues
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In general if no one cares does it make it an ethical
| issue?
|
| There is a big difference between "no one cares" and
| "society (weighted by social power) doesn't care".
|
| Entrenching and reinforcing bias against the already
| socially weak is something that society, weighted by
| social power, does not care about, but it is precisely
| that that makes it an important ethical issue.
|
| > AI ethics should cover economic issues brought on by
| AI.
|
| Capitalism's failure to distribute economic gains well is
| not a issue brought on by AI, and there is already a
| _much_ larger body of ethical philosophy directed at that
| problem with whose work anything the much smaller number
| of AI ethicists would direct at the problem would be
| redundant.
|
| This is not a problem that remains because of inadequate
| attention by an appropriate set of ethicists, but, again,
| because it is one that society, weighted by social power,
| very much _does not_ care about. Social power in
| capitalism is, in fact, very much concentrated in those
| for whom this problem is a benefit, and it is
| concentrated there _as a direct result of this problem_.
| strkitten wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/2347/
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| https://archive.ph/UIu69
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| As a tech-inclined person working at a private school with a
| healthy amount of time to putter and work on my own projects, I
| feel like I need to get busy!
| Bostonian wrote:
| "That person is high school teacher Christoph Schuhmann, and
| LAION, short for "Large-scale AI Open Network," is his passion
| project. When Schuhmann isn't teaching physics and computer
| science to German teens, he works with a small team of volunteers
| building the world's biggest free AI training data set, which has
| already been used in text-to-image generators such as Google's
| Imagen and Stable Diffusion.
|
| Databases like LAION are central to AI text-to-image generators,
| which rely on them for the enormous amounts of visual material
| used to deconstruct and create new images. The debut of these
| products late last year was a paradigm-shifting event: it sent
| the tech sector's AI arms race into hyperdrive and raised a
| myriad of ethical and legal issues. Within a matter of months,
| lawsuits had been filed against generative AI companies Stability
| AI and Midjourney for copyright infringement, and critics were
| sounding the alarm about the violent, sexualized, and otherwise
| problematic images within their datasets, which have been accused
| of introducing biases that are nearly impossible to mitigate."
| janmo wrote:
| We need the same with text to train Large Language Models
| circuit10 wrote:
| https://pile.eleuther.ai/
| simonw wrote:
| That's pretty much what Red Pajama is:
| https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/17/redpajama-data/
| angrais wrote:
| It contains captions. That's the alt text. LAION is used for
| train LLMs.
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| seydor wrote:
| " ...in america
|
| Unlikely to power anything for-profit in europe
| archerx wrote:
| I think Stable Diffusion may use part of LIAON and stability ai
| is based in London.
| pxoe wrote:
| "free database", except the images in it may not be so "free".
| even their "open" 400M dataset makes a caveat like "if we found a
| CC license, we put it there, otherwise, well, we just don't
| know.", so there's still a bunch of data with no license
| information, that got included anyway. their 5B dataset simply
| does not have license metadata, at all. a little bit misleading,
| a little bit malicious. completely enabling copyright and license
| violations of data it 'only links to'.
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