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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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So something I don't really get is this:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/12/23400270/ai-generated-art-dall-e-microsoft-designer-app-office-365-suite

As far as I can tell the AI art generation thing has been pretty exclusively led by tiny startups; this is because unrestricted text-to-image for the masses is the mother of all adversarial environments where your AI will, regardless of the safeguards you put around it, inevitably be shown to have drawn or said something embarrassing, and if you're a tiny startup you have the luxury of not giving a shit. Not so for the big players, which is presumably why Google's never released any of their fancy text-to-image or text-to-video tech demos.

(One exception: DALL-E 2 was released by OpenAI, but they only did that after Stable Diffusion and Midjourney threatened to make it irrelevant-- that was basically a forced move.)

So. How does this not explode almost immediately in Microsoft's collective face? And why would Microsoft be leading the generative-art charge instead of Google, given Google's massive lead here?

I assume it's just that Microsoft wants to recapture the glory days of the 90's, when Win95 was putting them at the top, and they've been exploring AI for the longest time. Racing Google to bring AI products to the users is perhaps just natural for them. Whether or not this proves to be Tay 2.0 will have to be seen.

No one is mad at Apple because I can say horrible things over my iPhone, nor is anyone bothered that the company that made my pen put in absolutely no safeguards against the pen being used to draw racist art. It could be that Microsoft predicts it won't be held responsible for any racist art its product is used to create.

And why would Microsoft be leading the generative-art charge instead of Google, given Google's massive lead here?

I think Google is more captive to the social justice left, and more likely than Microsoft to suffer disruptive internal turmoil if some adversarial tech "journalist" manages to coax a blackface image or whatever from the AI. Google still has scar tissue from the 2015 episode where their Photos product called some black people apes.

Your AI will never draw anything embarrassing if its training set has been compiled by Bowdler and Whitehouse. Can't draw a nipple if you've never seen one.

Ehhhhh that underestimates the ability of users to generate something that resembles lewd content by combination of prompts/concepts that are individually non-obscene.

The AI has never seen a human nipple, but if it understands human anatomy otherwise, and has seen other nipple-esque things, and will reproduce those in the appropriate positions on the human body, you can presumably get 90% of the way there.

Kinda like how the Eggplant emoji (especially when used with other emojis) is pretty much never used to communicate vegetable-related concepts.

Some possible examples from the DallE subreddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/y3wjlc/the_guy_who_makes_surprise_for_his_friends_at_a/

https://i.redd.it/mfqpopheavi91.jpg

https://i.redd.it/0o30m0l4z1r91.png

https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/xsqjyn/a_new_emoji_to_show_sucking_on_a_cough_drop/

Innocent prompts that, in human eyes can absolutely evoke something unintended.

I'm reminded of a couple of famous quotations.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"
-John Gilmore

"Life, uh, finds a way."
-Dr. Ian Malcolm

Yep. And you can only neuter your AI's capabilities to prevent shenanigans so far before it becomes too dysfunctional to actually serve the intended purpose.

Microsoft might be guessing that theirs will be used by corporate groups and the like while the ne’er do wells will use the ones already released by tiny start ups.

I would not bet against this guess.

Microsoft has enough money that why wouldn't they. Why risk losing market share to a competitor when they can buy it out. There is a small chance this will be huge, so investing a billion dollars for a potentially $1 trillion market is a good move.

They might be hoping to reframe the whole issue. Nobody blames Photoshop when people make fake naked pictures of celebrities: maybe by making it a tool like Word and Excel, they're hoping that people will see it as neutral in whatever it's used for. I doubt this will work (if Photoshop were released today, would naughty pictures be blamed on Adobe?) but they might be willing to take the risk, gambling on Office's existing image as a neutral suite of tools.

You make an interesting comparison to Photoshop, since people are already used to not thinking of Photoshop as being responsible for what people create with the app.

I guess it depends on the degree to which the LLM is perceived to be creating an image from whole cloth vs "just helping"

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