[XorNot]

I mean I don't know why we have to talk around this point: yes, you can definitely generate pornography with SD. Be prepared to see a lot of weird things, because that super-realism really means it just drives right into the uncanny/body horror valley at full speed.

But the second point here is also wrong: the whole reason these models are interesting is because they can generate things they haven't seen before - the corpus of knowledge represents some type of abstract understanding of how words relate to things that theoretically does encode a little bit of the mechanisms behind it.

For example, it theoretically should be able to reconstruct human like poses it has never seen before provided it has examples of what humans look like and something which transposes to an approximate value - an obvious example in the context of the original question would be building photorealistic versions of a sketched concept (since somewhere in it's model is an axis which traces from "artistic depiction of a human" to "photograph of a human" in terms of style content).

Of course, most people aren't very good at drawing realistic human poses - it's a learned skill. But the magic of deep learning is really that eventually it doesn't need to be - we would hopefully be able to train a model which can be easily copied and distributed which represents the skill, and SD is a big step in that direction (whether it's a local maxima remains to be seen - it's dramatic, but is it versatile?)

[boppo1]

>it can generate porn

It's not good at penises or vaginas, just breasts and butts. I can find what I like pornographically without ai. But the ducking and dodging around nudity and sexuality is childish and tiresome and we ought to discuss this topic as disinterestedly and nonchalantly as we do the other things it excels or struggles at. Penises and vaginas are not somehow more vile than other things.

Sure enough, sexual content ought to be age-gated and there is potential for abuse (slapping a person's face onto explicit imagery without their consent isn't cool yall). But are we working toward AGI or not? Because at some point it's gonna have to know about the birds and the bees.

[jes]

I think you mean vulva, not vagina[1]. Vaginas are mostly internal.

[1] https://www.allure.com/story/vagina-vulva-difference-planned...

[ofrzeta]

> to know about the birds and the bees

:) made me chuckle. AGI would need to know how to be evil, as well, right?

[airtonix]

isn't it obvious yet?

we're creating the speakwrite machine.

[eurasiantiger]

Are we talking about Artificial God Intelligence?

[TillE]

> But the second point here is also wrong: the whole reason these models are interesting is because they can generate things they haven't seen before

No, it's essentially generating mashups of its training data, which can be very interesting.

So a model that hasn't been trained on a lot of porn will of course do a very bad job at generating porn.

[barrkel]

Mashups is the wrong way to think about it. It's generalizing at a higher level than texture / image sampling and it can tween things in latent space to get to visual spaces that haven't been explored by human artists before.

It requires a good steer and prompting is a clumsy tool for fine tuning - it's adequate for initialization but we lack words for every shade of meaning, and phrase weighting is pretty clumsy too, because words have a blend of meaning.

[nathan_compton]

"It's generalizing at a higher level than texture / image sampling and it can tween things in latent space to get to visual spaces that haven't been explored by human artists before."

The very fact that the model is interpolating between things in the latent space probably explains why its images haven't been explored by human artists before: because there is a disconnect between the latent space of the model and genuine "latent space" of human artistic endeavor, which is an interplay between the laws of physics and the aesthetic interests of humans. I think these models know very little about either of those things and thus generate some pretty interesting novelty.

[barrkel]

I think of artistic endeavour as a bit like the inverse of txt2img, but running in your head, and just projecting to the internal latent space, not all the way to words. It's not just aesthetic, it's about triggering feelings through senses. Images need to connect with the audience through associations with scenes, events, moods and so on from the audience members' lives.

Aesthetic choices like colour and shapes and composition combine with literal representations, facial emotions, symbolic meanings and so on. AI art so far feels quite shallow by this metric, usually only hitting a couple of notes. But sometimes it can play those couple of notes very sweetly.