[techdragon]

And that it’s crippled to be prevent expressions of concepts of violence, politics, or sexuality. Making it the worlds most advanced clip art generator instead of a revolutionarily powerful tool for artistic expression.

And before anyone even says it… obviously they have to try and prevent child porn. That’s settled US Law with regards to artistic depictions of underage sex. However everything else they are preventing (and would ban you for if they caught you deliberately found a way to trick it into producing) is protected artistic expression under freedom of speech, first amendment stuff.

[stavros]

I feel like I have to comment here on the absurdity of banning computer-generated child porn. Presumably to protect the AIs?

[techdragon]

While some jurisdictions, notably Japan and the US Federal level, are not legally concerned with depictions of underage sex that does not have anything to do with an incident of actual underage sex, other jurisdictions such as the majority of US States at the state level have laws that treat any visual depictions of underage sex as equivalent be they photographs of a real event or artistic depictions of completely imaginary stuff.

So while it’s a fair position to take that banning it is absurd… as a Corporation in US legal jurisdictions such as I believe California, Washington and Delaware, they will have to comply with state law regarding such matters in three separate jurisdictions, easiest way being to completely prevent the objectionable content entirely.

[stavros]

Certainly, I was more talking about the law itself. It seems to me that if there was a flood of fake child porn, the demand for real child porn would plummet.

[Torkel]

The reason is that there will be more children abused. People who watch things will have a tendency to do that thing. Analogy: we had "fight club" fights outside bars 20 years ago.

I think it makes perfect sense to ban child porn, and strongly support it.

[throwaway675309]

"People who watch things will have a tendency to do that thing."

Given the fact that millions upon millions of children play incredibly violent video games without feeling the urge to go on killing sprees, I'd say what you're saying is completely specious, but I can understand that critical thinking can be difficult.

[Torkel]

In those video games people are in general playing as heroes. If million of kids where playing games where the "protagonist" was a school shooter then yes I believe we would see an increase in school shootings.

[Tenoke]

Do you also believe violent video games lead to more violence and should be banned?

[hoseja]

You're trying to argue with a taboo.

[blinding-streak]

Why do you want to sexualize children?

[stavros]

Why do you want to destroy all discussion?

[recuter]

Blame big manga.

[whatshisface]

The revolutionary powerful tool for radically upsetting artistic expression will not come from a billion-dollar corporate-funded research consortium and frankly a lot of artists would have a worldview crisis if it did. ;-)

[techdragon]

It’s probably not the same kind of worldview crisis but the fact that by massively commodifying unique (and that’s the key word since unique work costs more) business friendly corporate clip art and stock photo type content without needing anyone with artistic talent or skill, it’s going to suck away a lot of the money that would otherwise have gone to artists who otherwise don’t have a great career track as far as “average income” is concerned. Struggling artist is a meme for a reason, and when it’s as easy as “push button… receive art” it’s hard to imagine that not making it even more of a struggle. Which does feel like a somewhat incipient worldview crisis in a more career viability sort of way.

[kauguste281]

> and prevent child porn.

I think that ship has finally sailed with this recent release that allows deage-deepfakes:

https://stitch-time.github.io/

[techdragon]

Wow that’s obviously useful in a 100% legit commercial use way… surprisingly good quality… but instantly creepy when you think about it.

[dotancohen]

Warning: On my up-to-date Debian with Firefox 99, clicking that link locked up my system and required a hard reset.

[kauguste281]

Probably not enough RAM. The page isn't doing anything crazy, but includes a dozen or so example <video>'s, which in turn can send Linux into an out-of-memory situation that freezes the system (technically it's still working just really slow). Ran into that issue a lot when browsing around with 8GB RAM, upgrading that helped. Installing earlyoom[1] is another workaround.

[1] https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom

[dotancohen]

  $ cat /proc/meminfo 
  MemTotal:       16269536 kB

Thanks, earlyoom looks interesting. But as I know where my memory usage goes (Firefox, mostly) I think I'll just write a script to kill Firefox if I run out. Much better than waiting for the scheduler to kill KDE out from under me!

[kingcharles]

> That’s settled US Law with regards to artistic depictions of underage sex.

I'm not clear what you mean by this. The laws regarding CSAM vary a lot across the USA because of the different states and then federal law on top. After a federal Supreme Court ruling that virtual images didn't meet the definition of CSAM a lot of jurisdictions modified their statutes to make constructed images also illegal (e.g. cartoons like "lolicon" come under this). It really comes down to where in the USA you live, and remembering that for most Internet crimes the state can charge you and also the federal government can also charge you. I wouldn't screw with these laws either. If I remember correctly there is one US state that has a mandatory minimum of 100 years in prison for a single image.

[techdragon]

You’re right about the Supreme Court verdict and the subsequent state law changes, which is why I called it “settled”. It’s settled in the “normal conditions” sense. There’s basically no where you could operate the servers or send it to a user where it wouldn’t probably be a violation. If you operate in the USA then your subject to that hodgepodge of state laws, which mean you just have to avoid it because it’s too big if a risk.

[kingcharles]

Got it :)

[AnonMO]

A true artist can express themselves without violence, politics, or sexuality. Art is about using the tools available to you and creating art. michelangelo didn’t have cad or 3d modeling programs, but he created great sculptures using the tools available to him.

[techdragon]

It’s all well and good to mention great artists and such. But it’s a bad comparison, this is about a tool that is conceptually limited, it’s something art has never had before. We didn’t have paint brushes that wouldn’t let you use them to paint a nude portrait or spray cans that refused to let you use them do create graffiti.

This artistic tool is built to prevent you trying to create content containing certain concepts which is a fundamental new factor in how artistic tools shape the art that is created with them.

And in case my viewpoint isn’t clear, I don’t think it’s a good thing, and that we should not allow it to become normal. I don’t object to its existence, because I understand corporate politics and how it leads to this. But this sort of crippled tool has all the concerning potentials of “newspeak” in Orwell’s 1984, except to art not to language.

[visarga]

Blame that to the harsh criticism these models get on reception. If you say "picture of a doctor" and the output does not cover all races and genders with equal probability, then it's biased. If you say "John wants to become a *" and it fills in stereotypical male dominated jobs, then it's biased.

[ralfd]

> But it’s a bad comparison, this is about a tool that is conceptually limited, it’s something art has never had before. We didn’t have paint brushes that wouldn’t let you use them to paint a nude portrait or spray cans that refused to let you use them do create graffiti.

But is the comparison to 'art' apt?

The platonic ideal is that this will work like the holodeck from the Enterprise, but the skill is all in the machine, there is no effort or skill for the consumer aside from the decision what she wants to see.

I can enter "monkey on a bicycle" in the Google image search and Google shows me pictures of monkeys on bikes. Dalle works exactly the same. Is Googles image search for that reason like a paint brush? Should it make illegal content available? I don't think so, it is a content service. A future Dalle-22 may be virtually indistinguishable from Youtube or Pornhub and A) it should be able decide what it wants to be and B) be bound by the same laws like youtube or pornhub.

[techdragon]

The skill is in providing the inputs that produce output pleasing to the audience. To use another Star Trek analogy, “Tea” isn’t the same as “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot” by using more specific inputs you “cook” with the replicator.

This is the way it’s an artistic tool. You can say “monkey on a bicycle” and sure you get it randomly generating stuff, but if I ask for “capuchin monkey riding a red schwin bicycle with whitewall tires and a basket on the front handlebars” I’ve used the tool to craft a specific image I’ve constructed in my imagination, it becomes a tool to take what I have imagined and realise it, it’s an artistic tool just like the photoshop contextual fill tool is an art tool, just way more advanced.

As for future iterations… I don’t see any reason to assume that “Dall-E 22” or even “Dall-E 44” will somehow gain sentience and have tastes or be capable of deciding what content it want to produce for us. The “Tastes” of this model are determined by its training data, as is what it is capable of generating, you mentioned PornHub and that’s a great example, no matter how good the model gets at generating photorealistic things from descriptions, if they don’t include anything in the training data that’s labeled as “dildo” then the mode will have no way of knowing what to generate and will just produce randomised nonsense… so again you would be forced to use it as an artistic tool, to describe the scene constructively like they do with their dead horse example, “horse sleeping in a lake of red liquid” produced an image that looked like a dead horse in a lake of blood. If you have to do this then you are “painting” a scene by writing an elaborate description of everything in it and are using the model as an artistic tool in order to produce the visual image you want.

[mtizim]

Michelangelo's most famous sculpture is a beautiful nude man with his dick out, which is something that dalle's terms forbid.

[dotancohen]

I wonder that Dall E would produce given the input "Michelangelo's David".

[techdragon]

Probably put jeans on it. https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Itchy_%26_Scratchy_%26_Marg...