[carrozo]

Towards the bottom of the page they say: “The potential risks of misuse raise concerns regarding responsible open-sourcing of code and demos. At this time we have decided not to release code or a public demo. In future work we will explore a framework for responsible externalization that balances the value of external auditing with the risks of unrestricted open-access.”

[Traubenfuchs]

Are they afraid of lawsuits or are they painfully regressive, prude moralists?

Stable diffusion was un-neutered within 24 hours of its public release and the worst people do with it is Emma Watson porn.

[zo1]

In a nutshell they're afraid of people using prompts generating black people looking like monkeys/gorillas. And other such sensitive examples that others have posted/mentioned.

[mook]

Or they just remember Microsoft Tay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

[shmageggy]

It's not about prudishness, although generating pornography is one of the concerns. In the paper there's a full page on ethical concerns, but some of issues they mention are misinformation, and perpetuating harmful cultural stereotypes around race and/or gender roles.

[quitit]

While I understand that view, pandora’s box is already open, by their own measurements other publicly-available technology is comparable: so the only thing they’re stopping with this is direct comparison of their tech to others.

A more cynical side of me just thinks Google is rushing out the PR (including the hand-plucked sample images) because they can see that the state of the tech is progressing rapidly and perhaps by the time their tech is release-ready a competitor will already have something better (the new round of betas certainly look promising.)

It is a little bit on brand for Google to make an announcement they have the best, only for those claims to fall over later.

[aantix]

By the time they figure out the "responsible externalization" portion, competitors (including open source) will surpass their results.

The technology isn't special to Google. They don't control its proliferation.