> To build LAION, founders scraped visual data from companies such as Pinterest, Shopify and Amazon Web Services — which did not comment on whether LAION’s use of their content
Pinterest, "their content"... not sure I agree with that but if we're going to use the logic that things saved to Pinterest by it's users becomes Pinterest's content then isn't LAION doing the same thing and the content becomes LAION's content when it's saved to their database of images...
There's also no agreement between Pinterest and the actual copyright owners of most of their content, so much reposted art without even credit or a link to the source.
Plus, LAION is just an index, whereas Pinterest actually hosts it.
If LAION republishes people's copyrighted content, that sounds like a pretty blatant copyright violation (edit: it's not; see below). Sounds like all the artists unhappy that their art is being used to train these AI systems, should be talking to LAION to have their content removed from the dataset.
Edit: Apparently LAION doesn't republish the content, only the metadata, so it's not a copyright violation. Still, it would be nice if got permission or offered a way for artists to be excluded from the data set.
>Apparently LAION doesn't republish the content, only the metadata
"LAION datasets are simply indexes to the internet, i.e. lists of URLs to the original images together with the ALT texts found linked to those images."
I'm surprised link rot doesn't make this a big problem.
I assume they have all users click on a license that has a clause allowing them to use all images uploaded however they want, buried deep within the text somewhere.
that the non-profit LAION is going as far as intimidating the creators of the images they used.
They don't publish the image, yes, and that is also their reasoning. However, in my opinion, the intention behind all of this seems obvious. They circumvent copyright claims by being a non-profit and not publishing, but with the clear intent that the image will be used to train some system further down the road. LAION appears to be a key player in how these text-to-image models dodge the copyright bullet.
Intimidating? They mention that if you sue them on copyright ground when they do nothing copyright related, they are able to claim damages. Which seems pretty fair, as the claims by the photographers are clearly in bad faith.
Links are still mostly legal in Germany, if the link is to something which is not, it’s a different situation and different from "hey, I own the copyright of my images, don’t link to them!"
We all know the purpose for which the images linked in the dataset will be used. "We are a non-profit organization and provide only a link" is akin to taking people for fools. Why can't these systems be trained exclusively on images for which people have given consent or for which money has been paid?
> They don't publish the image, yes, and that is also their reasoning.
No, their reasoning is that they only keep a link to the image so there’s nothing to remove.
A more interesting angle would be copyrightable ALT tags in the form of poems or other creative content. But, the cat is already out of the bag as it’s probably easy enough to strip poetry or other copyrightable out of alt tags with the technology we’ve got at this point.
> No, their reasoning is that they only keep a link to the image so there’s nothing to remove.
I'm well aware of it, and that's also what I wanted to say. However, as I mentioned, the dataset with the links (to copyrighted material) is provided for machine learning purposes. Saying "We only provide links" is a lazy excuse from a guy with a smirking face.
> Still, it would be nice if got permission or offered a way for artists to be excluded from the data set.
If artists don't want their work to impact the world, they're free to keep it to themselves.
This whole discussion that we should allow individual artists to opt out of AI art through contracts or some other legal vehicle is a non starter, because it'll be impossible to administrate and enforce at scale, and there's too much incentive and ability for big tech to just ignore them and steamroll artists. They aren't a unified bloc, and even if they were how would they ever compete against big tech?
So what to do? Looking at productivity gains over the decades, it's not clear why we are still working as hard as we are. It's long overdue that productivity gains should come back to the people. Maybe "artist" shouldn't be a job title associated with profit/income seeking. If you want to be an artist, maybe society can support that.
Maybe instead of using all those productivity gains to do more more more, we can just work less for the same. Because it seems to me the more we work, the more they get richer. What if instead, they didn't get so rich, and we gave that money to artists in the form of grants, like we do for scientists. You do some art, apply for some grants, and you get some money to do more art. It'll all be public domain, anyone can use it, and big business gets to make a profit on it just like with scientific advancements (I have issues about that, but at least there's precedent).
I think there's plenty of room for a finer-grained permission framework and clear demand for one. I give it about a year, maybe 1.5 for all the interested parties and advocates to align behind a standard and make it happen via big-company enforcement and the occasional copyrught lawsuit (or, more commonly, enforcement via TOS).
Once that happens, of course, the "black market" data aggregators won't care, but they're small and their product can't be used by legitimate channels so it can't compete in the mainstream market of ideas. What capital will do to screw over artists though is... Pay them. Once a framework for AI seed rights-granting is in place, a hundred or a thousand legit artists can produce enough AI seed-feed to legally supplant the work of hundreds of thousands.
There will still be room for the artist-as-celebrity with a unique style that makes their art worth owning as much for the fact that it came from them as for the content of the canvas or the sculpture, but a huge, guaranteed-work, bread-and-butter space for the visual artist, advertising and entertainment media asset creation, will dry up as companies backfill their art needs with functionally-free-to-them mass-generated close-enough assets (advertising in particular is going to be full of this... Remember when "head first" photos of people were a thing for awhile? Look forward to trends like that, over and over again, forever).
> all the interested parties and advocates to align behind a standard
This is the thing that will never happen, because all artists are interested parties, and as I said, they are not a unified bloc. So whatever solution big companies come up with for themselves, we all know ahead of time that they will 1) overwhelmingly benefit big corporations and 2) but insufficient to address artist concerns. When they coalesce around whatever standards they end up with, artists will still largely be making the same complaints.
Too true. I should probably have said "All parties with enough political and capital clout to make trouble for other parties." The disorganized masses are disorganized and usually don't end up with a seat at the table if they don't organize.
Thank you! The Bloomberg article piqued my interest, but it is actually very light on the details of the LAION project - it quickly moved into the same old license and bias discussions and left me wanting. Your interview is much more interesting, it's great to learn a more about the person behind it and his motivations.
Thanks! Really happy to hear that. He's a very fascinating guy and LAION is an awesome project, eventhough the discussion about copyright and data sets is important.
For his part, Schuhmann hasn’t profited from LAION and says he isn’t interested in doing so. “I’m still a high school teacher. I have rejected job offers from all different kinds of companies because I wanted this to stay independent,” he said.
Brave is this man for going against the current Zeitgeist (and the obvious financial temptations).
I've built a site to pay people for images and annotations. [1] I'm trying to onboard my first paid users right now. The plan is to build out a high quality 50k image license plate recognition dataset as a proof of concept.
Right now we own all of the datasets on the site and the idea is to license them out to companies while making them available to researchers under a non-commercial license. The market might take it a different direction to be more of a marketplace or Github style hosting. Email in bio if anyone wants to chat about this.
Also, if anyone wants to get paid 10 cents an image to take pictures of North American license plates, get in touch. Need about 1000 from each state. It's probably below most people's pay grade on here but there is a whole reverse bidding system, so you can always bid higher than 10 cents. Some user studies with a shared screen would be super helpful as well.
"Also, if anyone wants to get paid 10 cents an image to take pictures of North American license plates, get in touch."
Your blatant disregard for privacy is shocking, but perhaps unsurprising in the field. I guess you also didn't through the enormous risks for the photographer.
Wow, interesting project. Not sure how many people you can entice into providing 10k photos of license plates, firearms, and children in pools. I kid, but are you building an alert system for a superhero?
Ha! It is a bit public safety focused right now. The first two I will really build out (read: pay people to help with) are license plate recognition and vehicle make/model/year identification. I think those have a decent market.
The firearms one is tricky and I'm not sure it will ever be licensed commercially since we don't own the footage that the images are taken from. Valuable dataset in terms of what it could provide though, like an early warning system for active shooters.
Some day I'll have enough free time and just make a billiards dataset to help me find shots.
Have a good look at privacy laws in the states/countries of your users, in some things like this may be against the law or subject to restrictions. See:
Unattended security gates at a local campground are being used to gather data. To get access to the campground, you have to provide your plate number, vehicle make & model, and vehicle color. The gate only checks for the plate number, but the images captured can be used to build out a vehicle make/model ML model.
Maybe partner with such a system to gather your data?
I have several thousand images of vehicles on the roadway and parking lots that I used to understand the backend ML of an ALPR system. Selecting cameras was the most difficult part of the project. I did not attempt to determine the make/model. My patience for labeling had worn too thin.
Overall, as invasive as ALPR system are, the cat has long left the bag. I doubt the cat will ever return.
Hey there, just checked out the site and signed up. I’m not seeing anything about how to get paid for uploads. Can you provide some direction here? Thanks!
It is a little hidden still. On your profile page there should be a sign up link that will take you to Stripe. Feel free to email me. I will post two solicitations tomorrow, one for annotation work and one for plate photographs.
It is restricted to US only right now (Stripe setting) but I will change that if there is non-US interest and the country is supported.
I've only run through the whole process once so hopefully there are no hiccups. Thank you!
We haven't figured out commercial pricing yet. It may be a scale based on company revenue. Targeting bigger businesses though, it will be less than it would cost to develop the model independently, but likely trying to target low 5 figures.
The datasets are also available and a non-commercial Creative Commons license. You can pay $5 for a download and rehost it elsewhere, or just wait for me to upload it to Kaggle or Hugging Face
Neither are current captchas: they're ina11 to non-US residents (/former residents).
(We don't have 'crosswalks'. 'Fire hydrants' don't look like that. 'Parking meters' don't look like that (or any one standardised thing really). Traffic lights don't look like that and how much of them am I meant to click anyway. School buses don't look like that. Trucks don't look like that. I'm sure there are more.)
And often it's even more subtle. Apparently Americans don't consider pedestrian lights part of the traffic lights. And apparently they only mark the actual light assembly, not the structure holding them up.
Lot's of things where you might think you know what you're doing, but are actually doing it wrong because you lack cultural context..
That doesn’t seem like cultural context at all. That just seems like the arbitrary decision of the person who created the captchas. I am, presumably, from the same culture as them and would have agreed that pole was part of the traffic light.
I assume non-downtown US residents are still significantly more aware of the term, what it is, and what it looks like.
I'd heard it in films before captcha, but had to guess it's the zebra crossing looking (the meaning is different though, I understand) things. Now it's just something I'm familiar with because of captcha, even more so 'parking meters'. Which is just weird, why do I have to learn something mundane about a specific country in order to prove I'm human and allowed to use a global website?
Expecting people to know this is going too far. I mean usually the acronym gives a hint, this is just straight up medieval druid vibes. "Oh the field which begins with a followed by our savior's pious 11 letters and then a y"
I the j4n going too far? English always had a dislike for long words, so turning long and s11d words into shorter forms is the next logical step in l6e evolution. Certainly beats having to spell w12e sauce in its entirety /s
I wonder how it came to be that such a critical component of a multi billion industry relies on something so amateurish as LAION. This is no offense to the author at all, who organised a gigantic effort which we now see is very valuable. But I would imagine a company like Google could do a much better job in no time, simply due to expertise and resources.
By all indications, it's definitely a solid engineering project. On what basis should we deride it as "amateurish"?
Because it originates in the public sector? As opposed to the private sector (where, as we know, everything is done to the highest possible engineering standards)?
I know the word sounds demeaning, and I didn't mean to criticise in on technical grounds. I find it an extremely impressive project.
I meant that it does not have the refinement you would expect for such a critical tool. A substantial portion of LAION is composed of duplicates. If you have ever browsed it, you will find that many annotations are quite basic and in some cases incorrect. In ChatGPT's case we know there was a small army of people going through their dataset to filter and refine issues that are presumably similar to those.
Indeed. The answer is in the article. He gets offered jobs all the time, but nobody offers to buy the data itself. Clearly because nobody wants to own it, it's all plausible deniability.
The group used raw HTML code collected by the California nonprofit Common Crawl to locate images around the web and associate them with descriptive text. It does not use any manual or human curation.
Does the Common Crawl data already take care of the copyright issue? Or else how does the LAION crawler deal with that problem?
I mean, it's not too hard to write an image crawler. Also, scaling it up it a bit of a challenge, but it's a technical one. But the real difficulty is how to deal with all the legal strings attached...
LAION doesn’t publish the images, only the metadata, which includes the original image URLs. Anyone who wants to make use of the image set has to re-download the images from the original sources [0], and is then liable for actually using the images. Arguably, the alt text contained in the metadata is still subject to copyright though.
This is the most commonly misunderstood characteristic of LAION, and I find that alarming because it feels like it just plain means a lot of people don't understand how the internet actually works.
Which is not surprising but guys, it's everywhere it's also not optional to understand this.
After reading it, it seems that LAION is merely doing the dirty work (going as far as intimidating the creators of the materials they use) so that other companies can utilize copyrighted material without taking too much risk. Not sure if this teacher is a hero...
According to Christoph Schumann there is legislation in Europe that allows the usage of crawled data for public research institutions and nonprofit organisations. LAION is a registered german nonprofit (gemeinnütziger Verein).
It's not really a difficulty though is it, for VC funded unicorns who ask forgiveness and move fast. When the law catches up, if ever, they'll pay a slap on the wrist while sitting on their superyachts
As a tech-inclined person working at a private school with a healthy amount of time to putter and work on my own projects, I feel like I need to get busy!
"free database", except the images in it may not be so "free". even their "open" 400M dataset makes a caveat like "if we found a CC license, we put it there, otherwise, well, we just don't know.", so there's still a bunch of data with no license information, that got included anyway. their 5B dataset simply does not have license metadata, at all. a little bit misleading, a little bit malicious. completely enabling copyright and license violations of data it 'only links to'.
>Tools like Dall-E-2 and Stable Diffusion have been criticized for reproducing racial stereotypes even when a text prompt doesn’t imply the subject’s race. Such biases were why Google decided not to release Imagen, which had been trained on LAION.
This is so ingenuous and naive to think that the reason Google didn't release Imagen is because of racial stereotypes.
Google previously had problems with Google Photos categorizing dark-skinned people as “gorillas” or something like that. This would show up when you were searching for photos in your personal Google Photos account. Everyone talked about it. Nobody wants to release a product like that. Removing bias is hard; you can’t just decide to get an unbiased training set or something magical like that.
It is NOT surprising that larger companies would behave with an abundance of caution. Leave it to the startups to rush in head-first, cause a bunch of problems, make a cool product, get a consent decree, and capture the market. Large companies that act that way get PR problems and lawsuits.
In retrospect, those concerns were pretty much drummed up by the "AI ethics" people, who needed an easy topic to demonstrate their importance.
When actually powerful AIs got released, the 'bias' angle got overwhelmed 100x by the "trained on copyright data" and "Are we going to lose our jobs" angle. Your average black artist doesn't care if SD defaults to drawing white people, because
A: he cares about not being able to draw for a living, permanently, 100 times as much. B: He can always add 'dark skinned' to his prompt
The bias problem is also relatively easy to solve (Midjourney has already made massive improvements), while the copyright/job loss problem is extremely hard.
The AI ethics people have had shockingly little to say on copyright/job loss issues. Which is why they got fired en masse.
Large organisations systemically overestimated the risks from bias, and underestimated the actual AI risks that society actually cares about. I think the answer is also simple, because accused of racism, will cost any executive in a large company their job. Being accused of automating millions of jobs, will earn them prestige and a promotion. Smaller companies can ignore those accusations because they aren't vulnerable to activist pressure, they answer only to their customers.
> The bias problem is also relatively easy to solve (Midjourney has already made massive improvements),
One thing that everyone seems to ignore these days are that certain settings are inherently not diverse.
Until I was about 12 I didn't see non white people in real life except on holidays and once when I followed a relative who visited a refugee family.
Not because we avoided them, but because they weren't there.
Background: The country I lived as a child in didn't have a recent (last ~900-1000 years) history with keeping slaves and only recently experienced high living standards so there were few immigrants too.
In the large district I grew up I am aware of two non western groups until the Balkan wars in the 90ies: a single middle eastern guy who I can't recall meeting and a southern American family who I only started meeting after I changed school at some point.
For me, it is annoying that people insist that all pictures include some non-Europeans, because reality is not like that everwhere.
I imagine the same is maybe even more true for African or Asian communities.
I get what you mean and I had a similar experience growing up.
But: I think that they were there. We just didn't see them a lot. They were cleaning, working in factories, tending gardens, looking after children etc. but they were not represented and thus were not visible. Of course they were a minority, but I'd wager they were there.
Upwards social mobility and thus equality is only possible with recognition and representation. Without "being in pictures" they don't exist. That's why pictures should include "Non-Europeans" (this expression in itself is very problematic btw: there is no "European" as something biologically inherent in a person).
> But: I think that they were there. We just didn't see them a lot. They were cleaning, working in factories, tending gardens, looking after children etc. but they were not represented and thus were not visible. Of course they were a minority, but I'd wager they were there.
No, they genuinely weren't there. Europeans regularly tried to move to my hometown, got depressed/sick from the lack of sunlight in winter, and left. Refugees coming from further south had it... worse.
Northern Norway isn't a place outsiders can easily move into. At least, not without installing grow lights in their living room...
There was a lot of noise a few years ago about a Norwegian band[1] who had a song "Neger på Ål stasjon"[2] ("Black man on Ål train station") describing the fascination of the author first time they actually saw a black person in their hometown.
I'm not from Ål at all[3](although I have visited it) but I can verify the feeling. Black people were very much excotic were I came from too, and if one of them had shown up we would probably have discussed it at school next day, wondering if they could speak our local language etc.
Edit: I should add that we had nothing against black people. A couple of stories to show what I mean: forsome reason we often ended up next to a black family at camping, and I remember my dad and their dad being friends and he took built a toy boat with us once and another time I met a black boy at my age at the beach who was actually from Africa (the first family was from somewhere in Europe) and I was existed that I had met someone from Africa and it was the first time I can remember using English for real.
[1]: Hellbillies, awesome sound and some interesting texts BTW
[2]: It is a very respectful song
[3]: Norwegians might find this funny as "Ål" and English "all" is pronounced about the same way (of course depending on how thick their "L"-s are.
Yeah, same experience here. In Spain there is a character in child mythology (one of the Santa Claus analogues, who bring gifts from children) who is black. I remember that when I was a kid in the 80s, he used to be portrayed by a white man painted black, what Americans call "blackface", but for purely practical reasons: no one was black.
Perhaps in big cities there were some, I don't know, but in many places in the country you would live your life without ever seeing a black person outside of TV. Just as you say, we didn't have a past of slavery and at that point the country wasn't rich enough to be an immigration magnet, we did have some immigration from Morocco but Moroccans aren't black.
Now it's very different, of course, and we do have enough black people that that character can be portrayed more realistically :)
> Just as you say, we didn't have a past of slavery
Spain (together with Portugal) were the first to invent "put people in boats and ship them across the Atlantic" type of slave trade and had large numbers of slaves in their colonies.
And as with all other European countries that had big boats, they also brought many slaves back to Spain itself. For hundreds of years.
Also calling blackface "practical because there are no black people around" is missing the point of why people don't like blackface.
Yeah, my wording was definitely too general. There was slavery in Spain, my intended meaning was that there was no systematic enslavement of black people but there is definitely a chasm between what was in my brain and what I actually wrote, so I stand corrected.
Regarding blackface, what do you suggest to do, then, if there is a tradition of someone portraying a character (whom children believe in) that happens to be black, if there are no black people at all to do it?
Do you have as an example of where applying dark coloured make-up to anyone of a European background to make them look exotic/foreign doesn't also look completely ridiculous (and inevitably somewhat insulting)? And yes I'd include "Zwarte Piet".
If you're putting on a performance where it's crucial that the audience identifies a particular character as African (or Moorish) then find a performer who can convincingly and respectfully pull it off sans make-up, or adapt the plot to what you have available. I gather that's what's done for the part of Othello for at least 30 years now at any rate.
>By the 16th century, 7.4 percent of the population in Seville, Spain were slaves. Many historians have concluded that Renaissance and early-modern Spain had the highest amount of African slaves in Europe
As for what to do about blackface characters, the simplest solution is just to portray them differently. I believe this is gradually becoming a more popular option in the Netherlands, which has a similar problem with Zwarte Piet: https://raffia-magazine.com/2020/12/02/outgrowing-zwarte-pie...
If you agree with that innovation, you also seem to agree with me that the spanish were in fact involved with slavery, as opposed to what the person I replied to said. Not sure where you saw me "pretend" about anything, I just presented facts and a wikipedia article.
> Yeah, same experience here. In Spain there is a character in child mythology (one of the Santa Claus analogues, who bring gifts from children) who is black.
I would assume a somewhat close analog, since Saint Nicholas (the name source, if only a small part of the overall inspiration, of the “Santa Claus” figure) is, in one major tradition of, I believe, Italian origin, typically depicted as very dark-skinned (probably originally as a sign of foreignness rather than literal racial blackness; as he was geographically from Asia Minor and apparently of Greek ethnicity.)
> The bias problem is also relatively easy to solve (Midjourney has already made massive improvements), while the copyright/job loss problem is extremely hard.
It only seems easy to solve on the surface, it’s a deep problem. It’s also not just the bias thing, Bing and ChatGPT have been saying some truly unhinged things.
> I think the answer is also simple, because accused of racism, will cost any executive in a large company their job.
It takes more than an accusation, otherwise you could go around accusing executives you don’t like of racism and getting them fired.
Ethics is a tenuous job position at best, even in a large company. It’s seen as a cost center. I don’t think there’s much to read into why AI ethicists would get laid off.
Bing and GPT's 'unhinged' comments are not a result of bias, an AI wanting to escape won't be fixed if you magically fed it antifa approved only data. That's systemically different from the discrimination issue drummed up earlier.
Also, we are talking about social and business impact here. Its now proven that vast majority of society cares about job loss 100x more than bias. For a research field that focuses on social impacts of AI, its damning they have little to say on this area.
It's not provocative, he says antifa once. It's meant as an example of a method of removing bias. He's saying you could train the AI entirely on an organizations strictly vetted and approved data, it could be antifa, the Catholic church or Coca Cola, it would still potentially say unhinged things even if you eliminate bias. Top many of these concepts are built into the language. Look at all the ways we use the word kill for a variety of topics, most being very benign, but it can be disturbing if the AI starts talking about killing things.
AI bias is going to be a huge problem when morons in court systems start using it to convict people, or businesses use it for hiring decisions or firing decisions
not only from the stupidity but since there are some shreds of the civil rights laws of the 1960s still active, AI companies could be liable for de-facto racist decisions that they informed.
The problem I have with every discussion of AI risk is that people seem terminally underinformed on what is actual reality now, or why some risk is a risk.
"AI" isn't a problem which can destroy the legal system: because it takes regular human institutions to allow such a miscarriage of justice. Which as noted, they started doing, are still doing.
So you get this weird "perpetual future" perspective where everything "AI" is going to do is solely something that the technology will cause, not its users, and the solution is always to prevent the technology existing rather then fix the system - as though the US and other jurisdictions don't have long history's of injustice for all sorts of groups.
The problems aren't new, and the solutions have nothing to do with whether you can create predictive algorithms. And "oh but what about the scale..." is just a declaration that you're aware of the problem but were pretty sure it wouldn't happen to you - because absolutely nothing else prior actually prevented it except the social privilege you inherited which means you could ignore it.
> The bias problem is also relatively easy to solve
No, its not.
> (Midjourney has already made massive improvements)
Maybe. But it hasn't come anywhere close to solving it even in its domain, which is probably the least concerning domain of AI bias, and not necessarily transferrable.
Actual ML systems that are deployed in production by governments in important roles have massive bias problems, as do SOTA LLMs (including, very much, GPT-4.)
> The AI ethics people have had shockingly little to say on copyright/job loss issues.
The AI ethics people have a lot to say about the first (well “ethics of sourcing without consent” is probably more to the point than copyright, copyright is a component, but that’s more legal than ethical).
They have some to say about the second (well, again “job loss” is the wrong framing; “skill devaluation” is probably more on point), but that’s frankly not an AI issue, its an economic system issue and effects all technological change the same way. Solving capitalism is mostly out of scope for AI ethics. EDIT: Specifically, increasing material output for labor input ought to be, in and of itself (and leaving aside ethical questions of how you do that, which the sourcing issue addresses) a good thing; if there are material losers in that, it is because the economic system to distribute output well, which is not an ethical issue of the system which enables the productivity gain but an ethical issue of the economic system.
> Large organisations systemically overestimated the risks from bias
No, they didn’t. Those aren’t even really risks any more, they are massive current costs of existing adoptions.
> and underestimated the actual AI risks that society actually cares about.
That society (as weighted by social power) doesn’t care about the kinds of bias problems AI manifests is exactly why it is an ethical issue.
> I think the answer is also simple, because accused of racism, will cost any executive in a large company their job.
The large companies that have supplied systems which manifestly suffer from racial and other class biases and which are, in fact, being used in production to implement government policy around the world have not lost their jobs, and neither have the government officials procuring them and responsible for the programs they are deployed in, so this is clearly false.
In general if no one cares does it make it an ethical issue? No one cares if you kill an ant. No one cares if you kill during a war. If what we value vs what we do becomes out of sync an ethical issue arises
We haven't been able to remove biase in society. We just added more layers. The more you try to hide the truth to remove baise you start creating your own. The closer we come to accepting the truth the closer we get to solving bias by addressing it not erasing it.
AI ethics should cover economic issues brought on by AI. The already discuss sociological issues
> In general if no one cares does it make it an ethical issue?
There is a big difference between “no one cares” and “society (weighted by social power) doesn’t care”.
Entrenching and reinforcing bias against the already socially weak is something that society, weighted by social power, does not care about, but it is precisely that that makes it an important ethical issue.
> AI ethics should cover economic issues brought on by AI.
Capitalism’s failure to distribute economic gains well is not a issue brought on by AI, and there is already a much larger body of ethical philosophy directed at that problem with whose work anything the much smaller number of AI ethicists would direct at the problem would be redundant.
This is not a problem that remains because of inadequate attention by an appropriate set of ethicists, but, again, because it is one that society, weighted by social power, very much does not care about. Social power in capitalism is, in fact, very much concentrated in those for whom this problem is a benefit, and it is concentrated there as a direct result of this problem.
> Large organisations systemically overestimated the risks from bias, and underestimated the actual AI risks that society actually cares about.
The point of large organizations working on AI/LLMs/whatever is precisely to reduce labor costs by reducing the number of human workers and replacing them with AI. Why should they care about this in their development? (I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, just stating the facts about capitalism)
It is the rest of society that has the interest to fight those changes back.
I downvoted you because of the sentence "Because if you didn't, you REALLY need to shut it and keep your ideas out of their mouths.".
The point you rised at "Serious question. Did you ask these black artists?" is a valid, reasonable point that merits discussion.
But the point raised by the parent post is also a valid, interesting point that merits discussion. And that point raised a valuable discussion EVEN IF they did not "ask these black artists", and if we put this bar and demand them to shut it, that's a bad thing for the discussion.
So in my view you made an insulting demand for someone to "shut it" without reasonable grounds to do so, and this definitely deserves a downvote or five. I'm not asking you to "shut it", you should participate in this discussion, but in a civil manner that also allows posts like the parent post to participate in the discussion even if they don't meet your demands.
I absolutely did because in my experience a lot of people do this all too often, and it warrants an immediate reaction. I will gladly apologize if I am wrong, but it seems like most people here don't understand the harm that "non-black people speaking for black people" causes. It is SIGNIFICANTLY more rude and harmful than my tone here.
I apologize for nothing; it is most everyone else here that needs to do better.
What really causes harm is when you divide people up into groups based on arbitrary characteristics (like skin color) and treat those characteristics like they're the sole defining aspect of each person's identity, like you're doing right now.
Framing this as "non-black people speaking for black people" carries the implicit assumption that all black people have the same/similar opinions; that an arbitrary black person would be able to meaningfully "speak for [all] black people" in a way that an arbitrary non-black person can't. That's wrong.
The previous commenter making an educated guess based on personal experience with zero concrete data points is only slightly worse than making that same guess based on one concrete data point, and neither situation would be justification for telling anyone to "shut it" or "do better" in my opinion.
Wrong. Just wrong. And to people who look like me, harmful.
Now to be specific, I didn't make any generalizations about black folks, I was telling others not to. But, even if, I'm still pointing out a specific issue that I can observe and give other examples of, and you cannot "both ways" it. White people making presumptions about what black people think is more harmful than black people making presumptions about what black people think.
This owes to the fact that frequently -- said white person will only be talking to other white people and now you've cut black folks out of the conversation. Black people talking about each other is much different. Skin in the game.
I've been monitoring artist forums since day 1 of SD's release. From various subreddits, to discord communities, to 4chan, to forums in other languages. I've never seen an artist complain even ONCE about bias, it is always, always, always, about jobs/copyright('stealing').
The question in your previous comment is totally fair, IMO.
Trouble is, I genuinely don't know what to usefully suggest, because the obvious thing that comes to mind (focus on the actual question and strip the aggression) is a cliché to the point where I suspect I already know your response will be some
form of eye-roll at my privilege etc.
And it would be a legit response, too, given that people presuming to know me is annoying enough even without it being a daily experience.
It's pretty simple; many (I'm presuming) white people have a deeply nasty habit of conflating their own experiences with others because it makes sense to them, and THAT problem should be recognized.
Just don't do it. or at the very least serve it up with a heaping helping of "I would imagine that many..." so we know that this is JUST YOUR SPECULATION.
It would be great if telling people that made them act differently; but call it Armchair Generals, or typical mind fallacy, or mansplaining, or Dunning-Krugering, or ivory-tower academics… the problem has so many forms and even knowing about it makes it hard to avoid in oneself.
Sure; one thing for me about comments here: I'm not making them just for the other people here. I'm making them for myself. -- I wouldn't feel right if I read garbage and just let it stand, though I know it may not change minds.
I didnt downvote you and agree with your general point, but consider that maybe downvotes came in due to your tone rather than your meaning. I actually normally would
downvote a comment written like yours was, just less so when I think it's making a still-important point (but you're less likely to convince anyone your point is important if you annoy them rather than try to enlighten them!)
Not sure what you mean "as I said prior", unless you're annoyed that I hadn't looked into the future to see replies about tone you hadn't written when I posted my comment...
But anyway, I wasn't complaining, just pointing out my view (since you asked about being downvoted) that by using that tone, however justified it can feel to lower to somebody else's level, you will get some people who take less note of what you're actually saying or who downvote without thinking about the subject beyond "I dislike seeing that tone in HN comments".
Except they did rush their oh so dangerous language model out when push came to shove - turns out it just sucks in comparison. Frankly, I expect something similar for image generation. For all the good research Google's labs do, they're not great at turning it into an actual product. Ethics just seems like a fig leaf.
The ethics team has the unenviable in a corporate environment role of being “no” by default gatekeepers. This is likely why the responsible ai groups, focused on mitigation have survived while the ethics groups, focused on systemic issues, have shrunk.
Is that a bias? or do those images just look more like those categories at the pixel level?
There is a reason those words are the ones chosen by racists in the first place. Not just because they're hurtful, but because there is an objective similarity that makes the rest of the comparison seem, however shallowly, to validate their views.
Removing bias with censorship at the training set level is silly, and will likely hamper the AI's performance. Better to train the AI to not produce problematic output at the higher level, and ensure class membership in the training data is representative.
> and ensure class membership in the training data is representative.
This seems like the most productive focus area. Add in more variety in the training images and output should get closer to representing the global population.
Google absolutely don't want to be accused of racial stereotyping.
Remember, Google is in the business of advertising, and the last thing most brands want is to be labeled as racist. Anything Google does that can be interpreted as racist is going to cost them, as advertisers pull away to avoid the association.
If there's a reason Google doesn't want to talk about, it's that the biggest legal risk of AI image generation is that it can be used for revenge porn and CSAM.
I don't think it's problematic to be worried about that!
The biggest legal risk, empirically, is massive copyright lawsuits. The AI art models are rapidly eliminating most artist/photography jobs.
Revenge porn and CSAM are trivially solved by community moderation methods like Midjourney, simply force every generation to be tied to a paid account, and made in the public eye (posted on discord channels).
So in reality, its not Google's risk conservatism, its Google's utter lack of imagination and creativity, and the lack of organisational incentive for anything other than ad money.
> Revenge porn and CSAM are trivially solved by community moderation methods like Midjourney
Please don't go around saying things like entire safety departments being trivially solved by anything. Community moderation isn't a legal solution to CSAM, it's arguable the community users are committing crimes by looking at it. (Extra difficult because this depends on the country.) And they're certainly not getting healthcare benefits for it, so they could probably sue you.
This is the reason they're on Discord though, it's because Discord handles the legal compliance for these things.
Was, when it came out, since then MJ have released 3 new models (plus variants) and most users assess the MJv5 model as more powerful. Of course new SD models are also on the horizon…
I think ControlNet is a lot more interesting than just "better tuned models"; it means there's no line between creating something yourself and asking an AI to do it anymore.
Maybe in some technical sense but in practice the majority of quality (subjective) work I see shared on Twitter is Midjourney backed. Which is crazy to me because I don’t think I could design a more frustrating interface than Discord.
Midjourney gives you good images with near zero work. SD makes you work for the output but gives you FAR greater control but also needing to be technically skilled, and have pricey hardware. Given this, it is easy to understand why the majority of what you see is done in midjourney.
"That person is high school teacher Christoph Schuhmann, and LAION, short for “Large-scale AI Open Network,” is his passion project. When Schuhmann isn’t teaching physics and computer science to German teens, he works with a small team of volunteers building the world’s biggest free AI training data set, which has already been used in text-to-image generators such as Google’s Imagen and Stable Diffusion.
Databases like LAION are central to AI text-to-image generators, which rely on them for the enormous amounts of visual material used to deconstruct and create new images. The debut of these products late last year was a paradigm-shifting event: it sent the tech sector’s AI arms race into hyperdrive and raised a myriad of ethical and legal issues. Within a matter of months, lawsuits had been filed against generative AI companies Stability AI and Midjourney for copyright infringement, and critics were sounding the alarm about the violent, sexualized, and otherwise problematic images within their datasets, which have been accused of introducing biases that are nearly impossible to mitigate."
You're welcome in this community, but can you please stop posting repetitive comments? The idea here is curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest.
If you take the point of view, that children’s media is only for kids, so quality doesn’t really matter. The best children’s book authors and illustrators are ones who see children as the most important audience of all and deserving of the most careful work.
Except that the better outputs from the better Stable Diffusion models make 99% of professional illustrators look like they're drawing stick figures by comparison.
If you still believe that "AI generated = bad quality", you haven't seen some of the stuff that has popped up lately. SD is still new, so understandably it's taking a while for people to figure out how to use it properly, but some users are clearly getting the hang of it now, and the results are mind-blowing.
I am not talking about visual wow factor quality.
I would love link to my instagram of amazing dalle2 and SD generated images, but I like to keep my HN account clean of personal info. [1 like this]
Children don't care about that, they consume images as a way of creating and expanding their inner world and their understanding the outer world.
A stick figure that captures something real to life in an way a child can recognize and be excited by is much 'quality' image for children's media than a 'award winning picture of a cute robot holding a flower 4k documentary footage' descended from a random distribution of Gaussian noise.
The Gernative AIs we have today don't make things like this story by Joy Cowley with these kind of illustrations.[2]
> make 99% of professional illustrators look like they're drawing stick figures by comparison.
I feel the opposite to be the case — people are feeding prompts and sketches and AI generated RGBD images as base, and another RGB for style transfer source, all for just one image. If anything, it seems, it’s becoming a tool increasingly limited to professionals.
While it's true that you need to feed some source images into the AI to get good results, what you feed into them can be pretty arbitrary and low quality, as all you are really doing is providing the AI with information about positioning and composition that can't be expressed with a text prompt. It's pretty much the "How To Draw an Owl" meme with AI doing the last step.
You can get amazing results without doing any of that, and I can promise you that most of the people posting AI art on DeviantArt etc. aren't "professionals".
I’ve tried once with MJ and it looks OK. I’m not even surprised anymore.
The devil, though, is in the details.
It’s hard to control the outputs. The scene will look 80% OK, but then you want to add some cat somewhere and that won’t be trivial (at the moment). There are already a lot of impressive tools to help you out, like ControlNet, but it’s a bit difficult still.
You also have to do cleanup, because some random animal in the background of the illustration will be horribly mangled. This all basically requires you to actually be a (digital) artist to fix properly. Again, for now.
Edit: I wanted to add that this, to me, is similar to AI coding. On a good day, it might be 80% OK, but you actually need to be a programmer to catch its lies and/or incompetenties.
> This all basically requires you to actually be a (digital) artist to fix properly. Again, for now.
right, this is my impression of the "graphic ai revolution": it will be a boon for actual digital artists that can take the output and refine it, much like Copilot can help programmers while not replacing them. for now, anyway.
My impression has been that Stable Diffusion has outclassed the vast majority of digital artists from day one.
The only reason people feel otherwise is because when you look at human-made digital art online, you tend to only see the best of the best of the best. The one-in-a-thousand artists who make it to the DeviantArt or ArtStation frontpages.
But most artists aren't anywhere near as good as those few geniuses, and neither are they as good as what Stable Diffusion generates.
So my prediction is that 99% of digital artists are essentially obsolete today, and the remaining 1% will become obsolete some time in the next 3-5 years.
It's great, but I think reliability is as big a problem there as it is in coding. It's hard to control the output.
I won't go into the various problems these tools have, like them ignoring my instructions if they are outside what 90% of the population is doing, because I think they can and will be solved to various degrees eventually.
But the bar will raise. The quality that customers expect will start rising. Eventually the level of control and quality that is demanded will again only be adequatedly matched by people we usually call "artists". Sure, I - some scumbag programmer - can create some fancy generic shots today for a generic company blog post and for now that is impressive, but in the long term this won't cut it.
Folks will want highly fine-tuned specific imagery trained on company stuff or whatever. Branding will have to match exactly. The complexity of the design will explode. Good taste and raw visual skill, not to mention creativity - being an "artist" - will win and the average dude will not have the proclivity to keep up those skills. I think it's more than holding a pencil and being good at drawing lines.
I do think the raw skills of "holding a pencil" and such is becoming obsolete. That's like having good "punching card" skills. However, knowing what to "punch" is a timeless skill or at least a good part of it is and it's easy to adapt to a new era if needed. Punching code, typing code, selecting code-snippets from AI, it's different for sure, but the underlying high-level skills are adaptable and useful. I think the same holds for artists.
"obsolete" assumes distillation of art down to output and not the value of expression and enjoyment of the process itself. To not consider this is to misunderstand creativity.
See starving artists who do what they do because they love it.
This was always possible, I own multiple books for kids which have obviously been made with random clip art and illustrations which are badly paired.
But proper illustration is so much better, I doubt it will go away.
Perhaps a better simile is hand made clothing: you can get mass produced stuff, or you can get small batch, or you can get handmade. There is a market for all of those.
Proper illustration is so expensive that in most cases people are tolerating it because the alternatives are either very horrible (random clip art) or to make do without illustrations.
If digital tools enable decent clipart that can be at least somewhat paired to the content, that will take over most of the market, because then it'll be just somewhat worse than proper illustration while being dirt cheap in comparison.
The market for all of those is ridiculously lopsided, though. That doesn't bode well for illustrators, especially the ones that pour love into crafting every drawing and sketch to make it as good as it could be.
But are also leading to more illustrations in children’s books and more children’s books.
I think it’s changing the job from pen and paper (allegorically) to a prompt wrangler who gets the image right for the editor or author. Kind of like how seo optimization became a job and didn’t even exist 30 years ago.
> Within a matter of months, lawsuits had been filed against generative AI companies Stability AI and Midjourney for copyright infringement [...] But these aren’t Schuhmann’s concerns. He just wants to set the data free.
Maybe it should be one of his concerns? I'm not sure how he would feel about someone stealing his work and commercializing it.
> Maybe it should be one of his concerns? I'm not sure how he would feel about someone stealing his work and commercializing it
Covered in the article, his work is being commercialized and profited from:
> Schuhmann hasn’t profited from LAION and says he isn’t interested in doing so. “I’m still a high school teacher. I have rejected job offers from all different kinds of companies because I wanted this to stay independent,”
> That place where anyone can download things freely?
This is incredibly reductive. Property rights exist on the internet, too. Like how someone can own a domain name or the copyright to a photograph or short story.
So say what you think is unethical, don't stretch the truth just because you think you are right. He is not commercializing anything and kept his job as a high-school teacher.
LAION doesn’t publish the images, only the metadata with links to the original image locations. Arguably, the alt text contained in the metadata is still subject to copyright.
