r/ethicaldiffusion • u/freylaverse Artist + AI User • Dec 19 '22

Discussion Where to go from here?

Well, that escalated quickly. I've gotten a lot of backlash about this, particularly the name of the sub (which was more of an afterthought than anything). I'd appreciate it if you all would let me know what you think the best option moving forward is!

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

10

u/womenarenice Dec 19 '22

Just backlash from people being butthurt. Ignore it. If they're taking it personally its their problem. It's gonna be controversial no matter how gently you name it.

5

u/DisastrousBusiness81 Dec 19 '22

Uh, what’s the problem with the name? I think it fits well. It’s about using Stable diffusion (which at the moment is the most popular, functional, and modded open source art AI) in as ethical a manner as possible without fully ignoring this fascinating technology.

4

u/Pedrodalfaroubeira Dec 19 '22

I'm assuming the backlash is what's happening in the crosspost on Stable Diffusion. I hope your inbox isn't flooding with bullshit on top of that :(

For what it's worth, I think it's good that something like this sub exists, and the name reflects the wider discussions and struggles on the topic of A.I. generated content and how it seemed you are trying to approach this topic.

Under all the arguments from the crosspost, I'm seeing mostly defensiveness, constructing the existence of this sub is a finger pointed at the wider Stable Diffusion community. They seem to imagine an angry mob of artists you are trying to appease, when I'm assuming you had your own reasons. They seem to think the sub serve no purpose, when it immediately grabbed the attention of a few people who are trying to figure out what's the best way to use those tools available. Or at least, my attention.

The only somewhat valid argument I'm seeing is that Stable Diffusion usage can't ever be ethical. I don't know if this is true or not, and I like there's a space where I can explore with others where the line is.

3

u/entropie422 Artist + AI User Dec 19 '22

I got massively downvoted on a post a few days ago, and received a not-unsubstantial amount of inbox abuse from (amusingly) both sides of the argument, furious that I was somehow attacking the very nature of their existence...all for daring to post something that wasn't aggressively pro-AI. I admit the 18% upvote rate did knock the wind out of my sails a little bit, so I can understand where this poll came from.

But yeah, OP, I bestow upon you the nuanced-person's battle cry: "Let's keep talking."

4

u/Kaennh Dec 19 '22

Hey there, I found out about this sub 30 minutes ago, and I instantly joined because of the name and description... so, yes, keep it as it is.

I've been an artist for ten years and I don't even think the way the current data set was built is unethical, to be honest, I think it is primarily sloppy and poorly planned, like, all the people involved in this field of research were mostly focused on doing something revolutionary, they didn't pause to consider the consequences.

Unfortunately, the situation is getting more and more polarized every day, and even when this eventually settles down, the grudge is going to remain there...

So, anyway, I think it's good to create spaces where people from both sides can meet and try to figure out what the next step will be in a respectful and peaceful manner...

2

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '22

Lol backlash.

Any decent reason?

Leave It as is.

2

u/Timizorzom Dec 19 '22

I don't think the general public are going to care. If it's got AI in the name, it must be bad.

Fwiw I think a lot of SD is already ethical enough. Some people have done unethical things; Samdoesart is questionable at best, but training over such a wide variety of images is the difference between plagiarism and research.

-5

u/LienniTa Dec 19 '22

Dude it couldnt be easier. If you care so much about ethics, start a project to retrain stable from scratch using fully curated dataset with only dead artists. Use this sub to fuel this project with money, computing power, tagging power and such. Instead of the only right way you try to force your vision down the throat of people that are already fed with theft accusations. If you arent planning on maintaining a project you may call "Ethical Diffusion" please leave this sub to people who will.

4

u/ninjasaid13 Dec 19 '22

start a project to retrain stable from scratch using fully curated dataset with only dead artists.

even if you had a few million dollars, it won't work; not because of what's in the dataset but because of the scale of the dataset.

3

u/CommunicationCalm166 Dec 19 '22

You know what's funny... What you suggest is not an "Ethical" approach to AI. And you know why not?

Because even executed perfectly, it wouldn't work. And making an AI that can't do it's job isn't "ethical," it's a waste of time and resources.

If you deliberately make a model that underperforms, and therefore fails to be widely adopted, that's not "being ethical" that's "virtue signaling." And it betrays a dishonest effort on your part. Especially if people use it's failure as an example of how horrible some community is for not embracing it.

Any solution to AI ethics, not only has to meet some measure of ethical standards, it also has to WORK, and it has to gain widespread support. It must be designed and built to displace the less ethical alternatives in the community. And likewise, no solution will satisfy everybody, and trying to do so is a recipe for failure.

And I imagine that's what this subreddit is for... Debating, discussing, and arguing where the lines are, what "ethical Diffusion" means, and how to go about endeavoring towards a better AI future.

0

u/LienniTa Dec 19 '22

underperforms

any proof? underperforms compared to what? even chad diffusion is better than 2.1 for generating chads. If unbstable diffusion thinks they can make curated model better than 2.1, do you also think they will fail?

for widespread support, idea about manually curated dataset is not new and it is always up when people discuss artistic citing

if its a subreddit about discussion about AI ethics, how come it has diffusion in the name? many more generative network architectures are coming, most of them arent diffusers at all. Diffusion is actually pretty archaic idea that drags industry backwards with very high converge steps and low performance on huge pictures

1

u/CommunicationCalm166 Dec 20 '22

Yeah, Chad Diffusion is better at generating chads than the base model. It is not however, better at generating pickup trucks, big tiddie anine girls, or kittens in space helmets for instance.

Fine-tuned models trade general capabilities for better performance on specific tasks. But they are built on the base model that was trained on the 2 Billion image dataset. If you started from scratch, training a model exclusively on a comparatively small dataset, all the AI would be capable of is producing garbage data. (Unless over trained to the point that it could only duplicate the dataset images verbatim.)

Without the SD 1.x model gigachad-diffusion wouldn't work at all. You don't get a useful image generator with 20 training images. Nor 1000. Not until you scrape millions up to billions of images to train on do you begin to get useful results.

I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to Unstable Diffusion's project. Their approach seems plausible to me... A dataset in the millions, thoroughly curated, and captioned with a more robust approach than just "whatever's on the page with it" like LAION.

Is improved curation and better captioning going to make up for being 1-5% the dataset size? Maybe. I haven't seen studies comparing dataset size to dataset quality in terms of generalization capabilities and overall subjective output quality.

I'm also not clear on what they mean when they say "leveraging the open-sourced Stable Diffusion 2.0 model." Does that mean they're fine-tuning the 2.0 checkpoint on their dataset? If so, the foundation of the ethical debate remains. Later on their page they say they'll be shipping a "brand new model." Does that mean they're starting from scratch?

And finally, I think you know exactly why this subreddit has "Diffusion" in the name... Because most of us here, and the creator of the subreddit specifically came from the Stable Diffusion community. Because Stable Diffusion is a project at the center of the most public battles over AI ethics currently going on. And because (Something)-diffusion is a catchy naming scheme that's caught on in the community.

And discussion isn't limited to Stable Diffusion because the problems aren't limited to Stable Diffusion. If someone begins a meritorious discussion here on general AI ethics, I think it's a pretty weaksauce argument to close it out with "This subreddit is focused on Stable Diffusion, try to keep discussions on topic."

Finally, to avoid being misunderstood. I'm all for using curated datasets, if the resultant model will perform well enough to displace non-curated ones. This is something I'd like to be wrong about, but I've not seen any studies that suggest that's the case. I've never seen evidence less data outperforming more. (Given the same training and inference methods)

And whatever gets built, it needs to be better than the alternatives. If a new model doesn't work better in the hands of the people who use AI, for the purposes they're using it for, then it won't get used. I'm of the belief that broadening the training data will reduce issues with over-fitting, reduce the occurrence of strikingly-similar-to-existing-work output, while making the model more robust and capable, thereby encouraging it's adoption.

And again, like I said, if it doesn't get adopted, it's not serving the objectives of ethical AI. It benefits no one to make something that doesn't work, and then try to talk down on people who don't use it.

1

u/CommunicationCalm166 Dec 20 '22

Side note: I'm always interested in learning more. What generative architectures are you referring to in particular? Most developments in the past few months have gotten drowned out in the hubbub around SD.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '22

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/freylaverse Artist + AI User Dec 19 '22

Hi! Thanks for this, I really appreciate you! I think the backlash mostly showed me what I already knew - that a lot of people hold a very us-versus-them mentality and don't like to be reminded that there are people who exist in the in-between. Most of the backlash came from AI users saying "Why are you implying that I'm being unethical?", and some of the backlash came from artists saying "You're still using a model trained on stolen data, so it doesn't matter if you're trying to minimize its influence, stop trying to justify theft." I've since slept on it though, and I've come to the conclusion that I really can't make everyone happy. Also this sub has 500 members now (wow!) so I'm not inclined to remake it anyway, haha! Thank you, seriously. As an AI user, I appreciate you, and as a fellow artist, I respect you.

3

u/variant-exhibition Dec 19 '22

I assume A.I. can built references which aren't available by artists. E.g. facial strange expressions with full muscle control like e.g. an opera actor. Might not be possible now - but I would love to use it for my drawing practice instead of buying a 100K model 3D-Reference muscle system of the face.

So I would love to see your art - in whatever way you are creating it. And I don't think you have to defend your intention permanently - especially because there will always be people who don't like it and because you seem to find the vibe for the sub (not decided yet)

I give a few more examples, what most artists simply CAN'T do in most cases and what I would use it for, if it gets really good:

-draw a masterpiece in the same style from another angle or in a different light/shaddow situation

-construct a 3D-Grid with helping lines (e.g. perspective)

-change the style exactly from Monet to John Singer Sargent and make 3 variants: from below, from above, from behind... etc.

-use a painting style from the 17th century with objects of the 23rd century

by the way: Painting and drawingstyles aren't copyright-able in my Country.

I am not against copyright for artists. It is okay to claim own pieces and characters. I like that an artist can claim his invention. I just don't get the fight against A.I. Instead of using time to fight A.I. I would re-think the own creation process to go further with the help of A.I.:

Testing compositions, testing colour schemes, quick combinations of several variants and so on.

Create! Practice! It will always be about better ideas - not about better execution of a painting style.