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Paranoid conspiracy time: there's a large push in the ML world to limit the access that the public has to powerful models. Lots of this is couched in the language of "AI safety", but this term tends to be used less in the Yudkowskian "you've been transmogrified into a paperclip!" sense and more in the "it is unsafe if your model says anything that would make your modal San Franciscan feel icky" [1]. Because we don't want people using AI to output wrongthink or insufficiently-diverse generations [2], we must have strong gatekeepers preventing tous pollous from using these models to engage in harmful and/or toxic behavior. Naturally, the journalists at Forbes are cut from the same political cloth as our AI safety guardians. They too recognize the danger that AI-powered hate speech and hate images can pose.
Enter Emad "Prometheus" Mostaque. He gives the plebs access to an image-generation model that enables them to spit out all the non-diverse, objectified pin-up bimbos that they want. This is the exact fear, finally come to pass! Therefore, is it any wonder the journalists would seek to discredit Mostaque? Failing to do so could mean that his next project, whatever it may be, succeeds, and allows an even greater torrent of unsafe content to be spewed onto the net. Given these beliefs, it's only rational to attack the man.
[1] For an example of what "safety" means in practice, check out the old LaMDA paper from Google, in which the model fine-tuned for "safety" no longer says that it is understandable why people would be opposed to same-sex marriage; it instead vocally supports it. Anthropic's RLHF paper has its further-lobotomized model make a strong denunciation against plastic straws as well. These might not seem like a lot, but it's clear which side these models are playing for. Additionally, note that "safety" is used as an explicit rationale for not releasing models; OpenAI says as much in their GPT4 paper.
[2] Recall that DALL-E 2 was found to be modifying humans' prompts in order to add characters of specific races to the image outputs. The original post in that reddit thread was, of course, deleted, but I remember the evidence being pretty compelling (Gwern ended up weighing in at one point).
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