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xanados  2yr ago (reddit.com)   3011 thread views

Reddit bans AI art model user for too many parentheses

reddit.com

So it turns out that the triple-parenthesis thing can get you banned from reddit even for benign nonsense. Some context: in some open source AI image models, you can use parentheses to emphasize terms that you want the model to pay more attention to. In this case, the author wrote "(((detailed face)))" and some other terms in their image prompt.

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Due to the lack of contextual awareness, it wouldn't surprise me if this comment was removed by an AI moderator. AIs moderating discussion of AIs sounds like it'll lead to hilarious things.

Maybe leaning too hard into the Culture War side of it, but I always found it lame and probably counterproductive to overly obsess over every supposed pattern, trend etc in the White Supremacist / Anti-Semitic movement and take maximum measures to suppress it. They're already an irrelevant micro-minority of a movement. This sort of thing just gives them far more attention and importance than they deserve, which is the most important currency in the modern age. I don't think they deserve any more attention than they are capable of earning organically through the quality of any arguments they make. It just serves to make them look cooler than they are, give them a persecution complex, and validates their claims.

Have they banned all LISP users already?

This really would have been better as a comment in the Culture War thread than as a thread of its own. We'd prefer people not start new threads just to talk about one particular CW incident.

In my defense, I didn't have any culture war commentary to go with it. As I said in another comment, I viewed this as being more related to site history than to culture war per se.

"don't worry sir, your son isn't an antisemite. He just wanted to jerk off to "elderly male anthro fox presenting feet!"

No idea what prompted your ban, but when I hear "free speech" I think the person is maybe a right-wing fascist conspiracy theorist who thinks their racist language on facebook should be protected by the First Amendment. So you may not be that, but they may be a little ban happy when they hear the phrase

I am continually glad we got the fuck off that hellsite. More because of the userbase than the insane moderation.

I still don't understand. Who are those people and why are they like this? Was it me or was it them? How did it get to where I sort every thread by controversial not because I expect to see racists and trolls, but people with actual opinions of their own discussing the linked content? I remember, many years ago, in the time before reddit, I'd occasionally peek at the comments of something like a yahoo! news article and feel a chilling contempt for the people commenting there. How stupid must those people be, I thought, that they spend their time hanging out in the comment sections of news articles that, judging by their replies, they hadn't even read past the title, which struck me as so utterly pathetic since the articles weren't even that long. Those comments always stood out to me as a major drop from the usual quality of discourse I'd find even on forums.

But then at some point I got linked to reddit, a site that pretty much just centralizes comment sections for other content. I still don't know if I actually degenerated from using the site or there was something there. I remember initially, I felt overwhelmed by the deluge of clickbait titles, the many urban myths that redditors were spreading around in the comments. Maybe that should have been my cue to leave, but I stayed. It wasn't necessarily a conscious choice, but it just seemed like I couldn't get away from reddit because search results seemed to be getting increasingly useless so I'd end up back on the site multiple times a day through google searches, anyway. I still don't know, did the clickbait and urban legend sharing actually go down, or did I simply stop noticing because I got used to it the same way one gets used to seeing fag and nigger on 4chan? Or an even worse possibility: was I able to identify so many falsehoods on reddit at the beginning because prior to that, I was getting all of my information from other sources, and maybe, by some later point, I had consumed an information diet so high in reddit content that now I was one of the many who unwittingly believe in many falsehoods?

Or maybe I just evolved over the years? When I was a kid, I was firmly far left, but I was always curious about how could others genuinely believe in something else? That is, how could anyone be for anything right wing, how could anyone believe in religion, how could anyone be for war? I got my start with Christopher Hitchens, evolutionary psychology, and libertarianism - those were sufficiently close in inferential distance as pathways to understanding beliefs hitherto completely alien to me. Eventually I made it all the way to where I can see why fascism can look like a genuinely better way to run a society, but god was the hardest one, had to take some mind-altering substances to see how that one might be true. I think nothing at all of it now, to be a left-winger at heart who can comfortably play devil's advocate for right wing positions without condescension. But I've found in life the feeling of "I didn't understand X until now, and now I see clearly those who don't" tends to be fleeting. Eventually you get used to X, it starts to seem so obvious, and before long you don't even functionally remember what it's like to not understand X, and you start to wonder if every smart person is supposed to understand X and if your journey of figuring it out only had to take place because you were an otherwise intelligent person who, through bad lack or something, had acquired really bad priors for X.

All this to say in the end that redditors piss me the fuck off. I hate it all: their formulaic snark, their seeming inability to realize that said snark is not an actually good argument, their persistence in relying on a predictable sequence of snarky arguments as if I won't notice the blatant straw man in the next one, their pathetic attempts to "win" by blocking and reporting, the nauseating ignorance of just how mainstream (nothing wrong with being mainstream if they'd just drop the conceit that TPTB aren't on their side) their views are, their many thought-terminating cliches, their faux education about "concern trolling", "sealioning", "just asking questions", "paradox of tolerance", their habit of reporting you to the suicide bot. I hope they're kids, I hope they have 2 digit IQs, I hope they're a highly unrepresentative, mentally ill subset of the population, I really hope people like redditors isn't the best humanity can hope for at scale.

Awfully convenient for big-tech that a relatively small opensource competitor has "hate speech" as it syntax. /s

I've always wondered if the parentheses attention format was intentionally designed for humour.

Probably not - () / [] are obvious ways to surround text in the context, and adding more []/()s is an obvious extension

Automatic bans for triple parenthesis is so typical of modern big tech.

Smaller forums could have some fun with it, like s/(((/💕/g and s/)))/💕/g

With a warning for (furry) NSFW: for those interested in the content of the removed comment (or, like me, appreciate the generated image):

Image source: Furry Diffusion discord

Prompt: e621, nsfw, by chunie and meesh, Michael & Inessa Garmash, Ruan Jia, Pino Daeni, male anthro fox presenting feet, beautiful detailed fur, fluffy fur texture, solo, on all fours, looking back, (raised long fluffy tail), balls, penis between paws (((detailed face))) ((detailed amber eyes))

Negative prompt: (((disfigured feet))), cropped feet, disfigured face, missing eyes, missing limbs, ((extra limbs)), blur, blurred edges, out of focus, long body, long arms, (((water mark))), ((captions)), ((text)), (((feral))), skin texture, duo, male/female, 2 toes, 3 toes, bad anatomy, child, young,

Steps: 30, Sampler: Euler a, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 721586146, Face restoration: CodeFormer, Size: 576x576, Model hash: 50ad914b, Denoising strength: 0.4, Mask blur: 4

how's AI going for your corner of the internet? You've made a couple SOTA posts that seemed pretty informative, and I think last I heard the generators seemed like a neat toy, but were pretty limited. Is that still pretty much the state?

I've not been able to keep up much in the last three weeks due to work, but it's kinda been a mixed bag. They're still very much in the toy realm, rather than central utility or even tool.

  • There are some people have been fighting some of the worst limitations to the system. The original release for StableDiffusion was limited to prompts of 75 tokens (kinda syllables) or less, partly due to the tokenizer; there's been some development toward better or more varied approaches, although none that I believe are complete yet, and other complete approaches like applying multiple prompts to a single image. Aesthetic gradients are a more meaningful way of embedding the meaning of styles than simple throwing 'greg rutkowski' at the end of everything. So on.

  • There are still some pretty harsh limits to what you can do. There's been a lot of different efforts toward solving resolution limits, and they've not been able to make a ton of progress. Complex, specific scenes remain extremely difficult to get with even heavy curation, especially when multiple characters with specific (and especially contradictory) traits are involved. Some of this is probably specific to StableDiffusion's implementation, given the better results ScottAlexander got from Google's closed-shop equivalent, but it's at least a hard step to get there.

  • People have had surprising luck training specialized models or vectors for models for some complex concepts and combinations, such as Charr (horned and four-eared cat-people with complex gender presentation, 400 images) or Nargacuga (a sort of bat-wyvern-panther thing from Monster Hunter, 90 images), albeit at the cost of very strong overtuning. I was worried about classes with small numbers of referents, and to some extent I'm thinking that nargacuga examples is probably under the lower bound -- it's not replicating its training data, but it presses toward a handful of common poses -- but it's a much lower requirement than I'd have ever expected, and there's a lot of interesting ramifications that might have outside of this sphere.

  • Other concepts, sometimes even trivial ones with tons of referents, can be surprisingly hard to consistently get working 'right'. It's somewhat understandable why ; it less clear why models do better with flareon and jolteon than umbreon and vaporeon.

  • There's been some mild interaction with 'traditional' digital artists looking to use Diffusers as part of their work, but it seems to be much rarer than I'd expect. Most of the major sites have or are in the process of banned AI-generated art, for unreasonable and reasonable causes, so not sure how much of this is just fear of getting caught up in that, not having any experience with the stuff, or not finding the toolset intuitive enough or useful at all.

  • Upstream models have gotten better. It took a lot longer than originally claimed for SD-1.5 checkpoints to get to the public, but they do seem to be improving areas of weakness like eyes, hands, so on, and given how SD-1.5 was trained this probably points to filtering out bad data and using more GPU power rather than some deep revelation. I don't think people are gonna retrain the finetuned models in too much of a rush given other spaces for improvement, but it suggests that at least some of the weaknesses in earlier StableDiffusion results aren't unavoidable limits to the model.

  • The upstream politics are... not looking great, and I've not missed that the few commercial successes (such as NovelAI) are using lower-than-CCBill-tier card processing. I'd be surprised if we ever hear what's going on behind closed doors, here, but.. that's part of the problem, and what we have seen publicly is discouraging. The Furry Diffusion discord's largely responded by enforcing a strong no-politics no-controversy rule, but there's a lot of places where the whole ecosystem could get shoved into a sack and dropped in a river.

Interesting to note that we're mentioned in the comments:

A large-ish subreddit (/r/themotte) went offsite. From the announcement

Reddit has become increasingly hostile - we just had a comment removed for discussing the meaning of various types of parenthesis, I'm not making that up, I'm not exaggerating, that's a thing that happened - and if the community is to survive, we need to disengage from Reddit.

More detailed explanation from the comments:

Hmm, maybe I’ll get a comment removed for talking about the people talking about the parentheses.

Our resident Russian made a comment using «these» Russian quote marks. Someone accused him of using them to hint at another unusual punctuation: the triple parentheses, which actually do see use by Nazis.

A third commenter jumped in to ask what the cuss was going on. When a fourth guy tried to explain the Nazi connotation, his comment was deleted by higher powers. His wording is lost to the void, but my guess is that an algorithm or a human pattern-matched it to Nazi apologetics.

As Zorba said, this isn’t coordinated action—it’s that the site tends to assume the worst when anything triggers their detectors.

Also the comment (removed), and archive

Nazis do (((this)))

But « thiis » is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet

I guess I’m proud that my explanation was chosen to explain this. And also that I didn’t get banned for touching the subject.

Is there a reason that this is a top level post other than @xanados being salty that xe got banned from a third party website

I put it more in the category of site history than culture war, and it didn't fit in the small-scale questions thread.

Yeah, I figured that would look kinda...suspicious. I guess at least there's the defense that it's the symbol that strengthens a token rather than weakening it.

I have a mild suspicion that the symbol was chosen on purpose for this reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic

I mean, in online moderation I might not insist on literal Blackstone's ratio (though perma-site-bans from a major social media site start to have some of the same connotations - ban from a subreddit is a community deciding to expel you, ban from Reddit is a rule that no subreddit community is allowed to admit you), but do you have any statistics on how many of the people banned for ((())) are Nazis vs. talking about Nazis vs. syntax?

No idea. But that seems the most obvious reason, and sounds like plausible reason (which does not make it a good reason).

If it was human reviewed: maybe also they have see whatever image was produced and "bad anatomy, child, young" (without spotting that it is in negative prompt).

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