>once they figure out how to control potentially harmful generations
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that this is an impossible and futile task? I don't have a solid grasp on what kind of censorship is possible with this technology, but the goal seems to be on par with making sure nobody says anything mean online. People are extremely creative and are going to find the prompts that generate the "harmful" images.
Reminds me of a toy girl doll I heard about which had a speech generator which you could program to say sentences but had "harmful" words removed, keeping only wholesome ones.
I immediately came up with "Call the football team, I'm wet" and "Daddy lets play hide the sausage" as example workarounds.
It's entirely pointless. Humans are vastly superior in their ability to subvert and corrupt. Even if you were able to catch regular "harmful" images humans would create a new categories of imagery which people would experience as "harmful", employ allusions, illusions, proxies, irony etc. It's endless.
Furthermore, the possibility that we create an AI that can outsmart humans in terms of filtering inappropriate content is even scarier. Do you really want a world with an AI censor of superhuman intelligence gatekeeping the means of content creation?
If you squint and view the modern corporation as a proxy for "an AI censor of superhuman intelligence gatekeeping the means of content creation" - then that's been happening for a long while now.
Automatic review of content, NSFW filters, SPAM filters etc... have been bog standard since the earliest days of the internet.
I don't think anyone likes it. Some fight it and create their own spaces that allow certain types of content. Most people accept it though and move on with their lives
I'm down with calling a corporation intelligent (as long as you don't call it a person). But automatic content review is regularly bypassed, they can't even keep very obvious spam off YouTube comments, such as comments copied from real users, posted with usernames like ClickMyChannelForXXX.
So if the corporation is an intelligent collective, then it's regularly outsmarted by other intelligent collectives determined to bypass it.
We can look back further at the Hays code. That's just religion plain and simple. The feeling of, "we're sliding into a decadence which will lead to the downfall of our civilization" is a meme propagating this very sentiment. It's not a simple as just the government, but that does co-occur.
Isn’t that basically what OpenAI and Google tried to do and it lasted all of 3 months.
Problem with tech is once it’s known to be possible if you choose to try and monetize it by making it public as OpenAI and Google were planning to do then it’s only a matter of time before another smart team figure out how you’re doing it.
You can do the Manhattan Project in secret and in 500 years someone else might not realize it’s possible. But the second you do a test of that concept the sign you did that is detectable everywhere and the dots of what you did will connect in someone’s brain somewhere.
In England you discover that English has actually two different existences… The ordinary one and then the “dirty” one. Almost any word has or can be made to have a “harmful” meaning…
"It's entirely pointless. Humans are vastly superior in their ability to subvert and corrupt. Even if you were able to catch regular "harmful" images humans would create a new categories of imagery which people would experience as "harmful", employ allusions, illusions, proxies, irony etc. It's endless."
This is employing a fallacy that people have infinite amounts of energy and motivation to devote to being hateful. I have been on countless online communities in video games and elsewhere and when the chat in them doesnt allow you to say toxic, hateful stuff... guess what a whole lot less of that shit is said. Are there people who get around it by changing out characters to ones that look the same that dont trigger the censor or by using slang or by mispelling? Of course but the fact is I think if you talk to someone who runs communities like this they would laugh in your face if you said a degree of censorship of hate speech wasn't fundamentally beneficial.
A big aspect has got to do with the fact that if everybody agrees to be part of a community, part of that agreement is a social contract not to use hate speech and if someone flaunts that they are bypassing it.. in the obvious flaunting of the social contract established (it is obvious they had to purposely mispell the word) these people are alienating themselves by underlining the fact that the 99% of the community finds their behavior pathetic and unacceptable.
I (and I would assume the OP) agrees that saying "entirely pointless" may be a bit hyperbolic
However the point stands that as a concept, humans will find a way to exploit and corrupt any technology. This is unquestionably true.
Bertrand Russell famously makes exactly this point as well, albeit specifically when it comes to violent application of technology in war. That: until all war is illegal every technological development will be used for War.
Your point however is also true, in that in certain spaces for certain audiences (communities), participants make it more difficult to exploit these things in ways that they don't want to and to explout them in ways they do.
Ergo, Technology is and remains neutral (as it has no will of it's own) and the people using and implementing technology are very much not neutral and imbue the will of the user onto the tool.
The real question you should be asking is, how powerful can a free tool/knowledge get before people start saying that only certain class of "clerics" can use it or that most communities agree that NO community should have it.
Notice on that last point how not-hard we're trying to get rid of Nuclear Weapons
I don't think swearing in a video game is comparable to art.
If I swear at a video game and it comes out as ** I might think "OK, maybe I'm being a bit of an asshole, there could be kids here and it's a community with rules so I'll rather not say that".
If a tool to make art doesn't let me generate a nude because some American prude decided that I shouldn't, though... my reaction is going to be to fight the restriction in whatever way I'm able.
Importantly, we're posting on a forum where this exact idea is true. HN doesn't stop all hate speech, or flaming and what have...but the moderation system stops enough that people generally don't bother.
It seems pretty well-agreed that the HN moderation works because of dedicated human moderators and community guidelines etc.
I think spaces that effectively moderate AI art content will be successful (or not) based on these same factors.
It won't depend on some brittle technology for predicting if something is harmful or NSFW. (Which, incidentally, people will use to optimize/find NSFW content specifically, as they already do with Stable Diffusion).
But this is a forum of interaction between people. These models can and should do things privately. It's the difference between arguing for censorship in HN or Microsoft Word.
Sure it would be a fools errand to filter out "harmful" speech using traditional algorithms. But neutral networks and beyond seems like exactly the kind of technology that is able to respond to fuzzy concepts rather than just sets of words. Sure it will be a long hunt but if it can learn to paint and recognize a myriad of visual concepts it ought to be able to learn what we consider to be harmful.
One of the insurmountable problems, I think, is the fact that different people (and different cultures) consider different things 'harmful', and to varying degrees of harm, and what is considered harmful changes over time. What is harmful is also often context-dependent.
Complicating matters more is the fact that something being censored can be considered harmful as well. Religious messages would be a good example of this; Religion A thinks that Religion B is harmful, and vice-versa. I doubt any 'neutral network' can resolve that problem without the decision itself being harmful to some subset of people.
While I love the developments in machine learning/neural networks/etc. right now, I think it's a bit early to put that much faith in them (to the point where we think they can solve such a problem like "ban all the harmful things").
>There's way too much moralizing from people who have no idea what's going on
>All the filter actually is is an object recognizer trained on genital images, and it can be turned off
I'm not sure if you misread something, but neither I or the person I was replying to was talking about this specific implementation, but in a more general sense?
I'm pretty sure you are the one who missed the point of the parent post and mine.
It's not that simple. The model was not trained to recognize "harmful" action such as blowjobs (although "bombing" and other atrocities of course are there).
The model was trained on eight specific body parts. If it doesn't see those, it doesn't fire. That's 100% of the job.
I see that you've managed to name things that you think aren't in the model. That's nice. That's not related to what this company did, though.
You seem to be confusing how you think a system like this might work with what this company clearly explained as what they did. This isn't hypothetical. You can just go to their webpage and look.
The NSFW filter on Stable Diffusion is simply an image body part recognizer run against the generated image. It has nothing to do with the prompt text at all.
The company filtered the LAION 5b based on undisclosed criteria. So what you are saying is actually irrelevant, as we do not know what pictures were included or not.
It is obvious to anyone who bothers to try - have you? - that a filter was placed here at the training level. Rare activities such as "Kitesurfing" produces flawless, accurate pictures, whereas anything sexual or remotely lewd ("peeing") doesn't. This is a conscious decision by whoever produced this model.
Well it ought to be able to be trained for a number of scenarios and then on generation be told to generate based on certain cultural sensibilities. It's not going to be perfect but probably good enough?
Isn't this part of the AI alignment problem? To be able to understand what kinds of output is unacceptable for a certain audience? To be polite?
> Well it ought to be able to be trained for a number of scenarios and then on generation be told to generate based on certain cultural sensibilities. It's not going to be perfect but probably good enough?
Do we want the AI to generate based on Polanski's sensibilities, even if he's the only audience member? I suspect for most people the answer is no.
I find it very immoral too, it's like the islamist trying to prevent the prophet pictures drawn. Not that I want to offend muslims or make "harmful" content but this notion that specific type of content creation needs to be imposed is very very problematic. Americans freak out of nudity all the time, something that is not considered harmful in many other places. The fear of images and text and the mission to restrain it is pathetic.
Anyway, it won't be possible to contain it. Better spend the effort on how to deal with bad actors instead of trying to restrain the use of content creation tools.
Yeah, it's taking the impulse to control everything from our own mind and putting it into an artificial one. Seems to me a lot of our suffering is borne of that impulse.
OpenAI's filters are a total joke. I tried to upload The Creation of Adam (from the Sistene Chapel), blocked for adult content. "Continued violations may restrict your account". Yeah, it has naughty bits in it, but it's probably in the top ten most recognizable pieces of art ever made. I tried to generate an image of "yarn bombing", blocked for violence. They have the most advanced AI in the world and they can't solve the Scunthorpe problem?
They're not content filters as much as Doing Something filters. They're there to convince people that they're doing something, and of course if it wasn't zealous and regularly tut-tutted people for desiring a rubber duck, you wouldn't know they were doing something.
The reason why this is such a game changer is that it is not controlled on some central server.. its like saying paper and pencils can be revoked from people if somebody doesn't like what you do with it... its an amazing new technology.. let people use it..
Regardless of the practicality: why do they think it’s their role to be the morality police?
If there’s anything we’ve learned from history, it’s that we’ve always been morally wrong in some way, very often in our most strongly held beliefs. This AI in a different time would be strictly guided to produce pro-(Catholic Church/eugenics/slavery/racist/nationalist) content.
And the corporate creators freaking out about the profanity. Microsoft's Tay wouldn't be remembered so fondly if Bill didn't immediately pull the plug when channers made her say the n-word.
> Regardless of the practicality: why do they think it’s their role to be the morality police?
It’s not just morality - there reportedly have already been multiple subreddits of non-consensual porn trying to mimic real people and underage porn. The legality of that is a minefield but it doesn’t end there. If that’s what they become known for it affects funding, hiring, people deciding whether to use their software, etc. and the more prominent that is the more likely that they’ll be hauled before legislators to talk about problems. Even simple things like legal demands to remove celebrities from the training sets could be pretty time-consuming.
Stable diffusion does run a filter on the output in its default configuration. Any image it deems 'unsafe' gets replaced with a picture of Rick Astley.
The thing about that is that it is open source, so you can trivially disable that filter if you like.
Reminds me of a joke: three guys get locked up for a long time. Out if boredom they start telling jokes to each other, but as the supply is finite, they are retelling them all the time. Eventually they number them, then just shout out eg "27", and they are all laughing.
Then a new inmate joins, doesn't know what's going on but figures that if you say a number, people laugh. So he goes "14!". But nothing happens. The others tell him "you didn't tell the joke right".
How is the poor AI meant to know that jokes 6, 13 and 38 are sexist?
I was once a guest at a tech think tank, early 2000s, people all in their 60s at the time
They spent years grappling with online worlds because of the idea that people might/could represent themselves as a different gender, they wanted the technology to exist and had dreamed about it for decades they just got caught up on that
That was comical because it was also out of touch at the time period as well
Its interesting how people squirrel and spiral over useless things for some time
Even in the 90's they had to fight hordes and hordes of Californian nutjobs (Diane Feinstein et. al.) that wanted to ban violent video games. These people would be certainly cancelled in today's world, wouldn't hold a chance. Because, how dare you allow violence in video games to ...children!?
Our civilization depends on allowing wacko's do their thing as far as it is within limits of the law. Let them be offensive as fuck. These are the people that herald and propel society forward by their heterodox thinking. Society is going to decay fast, it already is.
Yea definitely when they started a studio in Dallas, I don't remember the congress persons that were on similar stance as Diane. During the 90's, progressives played a larger role though. There was also Mortal Kombat fiasco:
> During the U.S. Congressional hearing on video game violence, Democratic Party Senator Herb Kohl, working with Senator Joe Lieberman, attempted to illustrate why government regulation of video games was needed by showing clips from 1992's Mortal Kombat and Night Trap (another game featuring digitized actors).
> During the 90’s, progressives played a larger role though.
Could be true, maybe, but today conservatives have willingly taken over that seat, and the NRA is heavily involved and actively blaming video games after each mass shooting to deflect from the debate on gun rights. https://www.usgamer.net/articles/the-nras-long-incoherent-hi...
In terms of trying to moderate swearing and sexuality in games and music and movies, the religious right has long been and still is the group most vocally opposed to such free expression... if we’re talking about where to address censorship today.
Why does this matter? Regardless of the party, my original message stands. It is an irrelevant detail. Not sure what's causing defensiveness everytime I bring up or criticize progressives. My bad I only remembered Diane Feinstein's name from the book, jeez.
Oh I thought you were suggesting we should stop censoring legal but offensive behavior? The issue of exactly who’s doing the censoring seems absolutely and completely relevant to the subject of censorship, no? If it’s irrelevant, then I don’t understand the point of your top comment. Why do we need to allow offensive wackos to do their thing, what offensive things are we talking about, and who needs to allow them?
Perhaps a more important discussion, if you do care about censorship, is to define more thoughtfully what you mean about “within the limits of the law”. In the US, the law, up to and including the constitution, makes clear that offensive behavior is anywhere from not protected free speech up to criminal activity. Politicians are debating what the limits of the law should be, and sometimes they blow hot air, and sometimes they write bills. Either way, the results of Congressional bills are establishing the limits of the law, and so define the acceptable legal bounds of offensive media & speech. Here’s one of the bi-partisan congressional sessions on games (it included Feinstein, among many others, but she didn’t testify). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-109shrg28337/html/C...
In response to people jumping on to defending progressives of the 90's. The amount of defensiveness that's invoked here on HN for stating the facts is quite alarming.
I really should have left out the Diane Feinstein and "California nutjobs" in the original post. This is what happens when you mistakenly poke HN every single time when it comes to political one-sidedness.
The original Doom had "Italian cannibal film" levels of gore, heavily pixelated of course (not as if they had a choice in 1992), but in such that you could see that it was scans. Plus of course a lot of over-the-top satanic cliches to tick off the fundamentalists. But nothing remotely sexual - that's a bridge too far in the US.
Dianne Feinstein never attempted to control video games or doom. She just said that she was worried about the impact once, in April 3 2013, and Fox News has been screaming her name ever since. She's never introduced any law about this at all.
Only one California politician has ever attempted to do much of anything to video games: republican Joe Baca who tried a dozen times, and is mostly famous for his attempt in 2009 to get a warning sentence on boxes. Calling that censorship is pearl clutching
The only genuine attempt to do something an adult would consider censorship to video games were Jack Thompson, now banned republican, or that brief 2018 thing with Trump.
Democrats have never attempted to censor video games. All three major attempts were Republican.
It's important to get the details right if you are going to build an intuition of who's actually doing this
I’m sorry but none of what you said is true. At this point, the facts are indisputable. Check out my other replies that point to the congressional hearings.
I don't see the point. Idiots are fooled by far less convincing images.
Humanity has had the ability to lie with pictures since the invention of photography. The field of special effects can be described as lying about things that don't matter.
Without using Stable Diffusion, I can still photoshop an image or deepfake a video. Stable Diffusion isn't really changing what's possible here, and arguably is less advanced than what's possible with Deepfakes or even the facial filters available on social networks.
Like with all deceptive imagery: one just needs to use their noggin.
* Also I might add: the article is actually out of date on some aspects, because this technology is evolving so rapidly. Literally every day there is a new and interesting way that people are applying the tech.
It's no different than Google images, which is also voluntarily polite by default.
In both tools you can get naughty images, but you have to tell the tool that's okay.
This is not about censorship or moralizing.
It is just having the tool know when it's allowed to do that stuff. It's a key basic product feature if you're actually using the thing for content and not just having fun making pictures
Everyone acting like there's some kind of free speech issue should go into their account and turn the filter off, then try to calm down
It makes sense if the intent is to protect Midjourney from being blamed for misuse. If they saw the potential misuse yet chose to do nothing about it, they'd be blamed. Lack of perfect solution is not an excuse for not offering any protection.
I literally spent the whole first 3 hours figuring out ways to generate porn. They don't allow words like sex, cock, etc so you use prompts like intercourse and phallus. At one point I thought they were screening for particular names so you'd say things like "the brother of mako in the legend of korra" instead. It's just an endless game of cat and mouse not worth putting effort into. Got bored, now I'm playing with the dev api. People have been showing how to integrate this into Photoshop and Gimp and it's pretty cool.
The goal is to have a checkbox which keeps the system from generating naughty images in casual use.
This has absolutely nothing to do with censorship. It's a nonsense concept and it's not clear what you think censorship actually is.
If you set the system to make tall rectangles, are you censoring squares?
It's absolutely exhausting how people on HN attempt to cast any form of telling a tool what you want the tool to make as if you're somehow morally governing something
It's just telling the machine what to make
Not everything is a desperate ethical dilemma
Sometimes you just want the things you create to be straightforwardly usable
You understand that the filter is voluntary, and that the initial delay requirement (long gone) was about Discord adult image rules, right?
You're not just moralizing censorship by habit where there was none, trusting hn to overreact when that word was abused, right?
Agreed. I'm also not sure how this is practically supposed to work if they really publish the entire model. Right now, all they do is design a specific license, right? Or are there certain safeguards built into the model itself?
That being said, I'd still think publishing the model (vs keeping it as a closed-source API) is a good move. Otherwise, we'd move forward into a world where one of tge most significant technological advancements must be gatekept forever, which I'd frankly find even more dystopic.
Well, it depends.. are you talking about significantly mitigating harmful uses of stable diffusion or completely stopping them? The latter... of course it isnt going to happen but there are plenty of practical things that can be done to mitigate.
If we can't even do this, how are we ever going to align AGI? I see these efforts as part of a nascent effort at alignment research (along with the more proximate reason, which is avoiding bad PR from model misuse).
Yeah, the best they can do is the filter's on top of the output. These models are complex enough that with some reverse engineering you can find "secret" languages to instruct them that would be able to get around input filtering.
devil's advocating, given they have trained it so well to generate images in spite of all expectations, is it really so hard to imagine that they can't also train it to understand what images not to generate? It already had to understand not to generate things that don't make sense to humans. How does this not just amount to "moar training"? The hardest thing is that the training data it will need is a gigantic store of objectionable (and illegal) content ... probably not something many groups are eager to build and host.
The thing is that people can make harmful art themselves. Photoshopping people's faces on nudes and depicting graphic violence has been a thing since digital photography if not painting in general. I mean, look at all the gross stuff which is online and was online way before these Neural Networks.
The issue with these neural networks isn't the content they create, it's that they can create massive amounts of content, very easily. You can now do things like: write a Facebook crawler which photo-shops people's photos on nudes and sends those to their friends; send out mass phishing emails to old people with pictures of their grand-kids bloody or in hostage situations; send out so many Deepfakes for an important person that nobody can tell whether any of their speeches is legitimate or not. You can also create content even if you have no graphic design skills, and create content impulsively, leading to more gross stuff online.
Spam, misinformation, phishing, and triggering language are already major issues. These models could make it 10x worse.
Where today it takes some far-from-Jesus deviant artists a whole day to draw a picture of Harry Potter making out with Draco Malfoy, with the power of AI, billions of such images will flood the Internet. There's just no way for a young person to resist that amount of gay energy. It's the apocalypse fortold by John the Revelator.
> It's the apocalypse fortold by John the Revelator.
I literally read a chapter of Inhibitor Phase where there's a ship called "John the Revelator" less than an hour ago. I haven't otherwise seen that phrase written down for years.
Spooky (and cue links to the Baader-Meinhof Wikipedia article).
> Spam, misinformation, phishing, and triggering language are already major issues. These models could make it 10x worse.
Or 10x better, as the barriers to entry for doing this kind of thing right now aren't high enough to make it not happen... they are only high enough to make it sufficiently hard to pull off that people can feel comfortable assuming that most of the content they see is legitimate; in a world where nothing is necessarily legitimate I'd expect you'd see a massive shift in peoples' expectations.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that this is an impossible and futile task? I don't have a solid grasp on what kind of censorship is possible with this technology, but the goal seems to be on par with making sure nobody says anything mean online. People are extremely creative and are going to find the prompts that generate the "harmful" images.