[fnordpiglet]

The fact we, and many people, are having these conversations wouldn’t happen if they curated societies biases out of their product.

Saying their product perpetuates stereotypes but ignoring its reflecting the entirety of medias bias is ignoring that all media perpetuates these stereotypes, and their models are no more or less perpetuating of these stereotypes than literally the entirety of all media. The fact they hold it up for careful examination in an irrefutable way is a feature in my mind, not a flaw.

I would note that SD produces a base model, which can and is routinely fine tuned. I would rather see a fine tuning that eliminates the bias in the media than see a base model that is fundamentally divergent from the state of the media today. That’s the proper abstraction - a base model that’s the basic output from mass training on available media, and models that specialize for some curation. But I also object to the base models being censored. The reason why is it cuts off a base truth from the semantic models underlying such that it’s outputs are at odds with observable reality. Specialized models shouldn’t be doing things like un censoring, but adjusting base truth to curated views. “Unbiased model” should be a fine tuning of reality. “Safe for work model” should be a fine tuning of reality. The challenge is the model producers don’t trust the model users to be adults making adult decisions and thinking adult thoughts - including about biases, stereotypes, etc.

But regardless, I think base models should never be thought of as final products but as a basis to produce a final product.

[chefandy]

> Saying their product perpetuates stereotypes but ignoring its reflecting the entirety of medias bias is ignoring that all media perpetuates these stereotypes

Not being further up on a hierarchy of many bad actors doesn't absolve you from responsibility. What goes into these models is an editorial decision, as is which one to use in your software. This author isn't distributing models and they aren't being held to task over the model's content— they're generating images from those models and distributing them, and those images are what bother people. If they used the same model but somehow didn't get objectionable results, nobody would know, let alone care.

You say the media is to blame? Sure. When you start generating content with a particular perspective, you are media.