Hasnain says:

It’s been crazy watching the explosion in this technology since DALL-E was announced - openai must be a bit annoyed that free alternatives are now available. I’ve been playing around with stable diffusion and the results are really good with only a couple minutes of first attempts - can’t even imagine how they would be with more work.

“As such, each image in the training set contributes only a tiny amount of information—a few tweaks to some numeric weights spread across the entire network.

But... the people who created these images did not give their consent. And the model can be seen as a direct threat to their livelihoods. No-one expected creative AIs to come for the artist jobs first, but here we are!

I’m still thinking through this, and I’m eager to consume more commentary about it. But my current mental model is to think about this in terms of veganism, as an analogy for people making their own personal ethical decisions.

I know many vegans. They have access to the same information as I do about the treatment of animals, and they have made informed decisions about their lifestyle, which I fully respect.

I myself remain a meat-eater.”

Posted on 2022-08-31T17:05:03+0000