How to safely move a live wire.

I’m just wondering if it’ll be Open Source. It seems like they’re working for Nvidia now.

Tiamat-8b-1.2-Llama-3-DPO-GGUF

This isn’t undermining artists, it’s expanding access and knowledge, enabling individuals to take control of their own destinies. Open-source AI will empower artists, existing artists and newly active or returning artists who give this new medium a shot, by giving them the new tools that will push the frontiers of self-expression and redefine creativity this decade.

100 years ago photographers and filmmakers significantly disrupted the careers of most illustrators, story tellers, and theater companies of the time. Despite this, storytelling and image making exploded, entering a new golden age. Musicians panicked over the use of synthesizers in the 80s too often refusing to work with people involved with synthesizers. As a result, there are fewer drummers today than in 1970, but out of that came hip hop and house. Suppressing that tool would have been a huge cultural loss. Generative art hasn’t found its Marley Marl or Frankie Knuckles yet, but they’re out there, and they’re going to do stuff that will blow our minds. Cutting edge tools and techniques have always propelled art and artists forward. Every advancement a leap forward, leaving behind constraints and enabling more people to pursue their creative aspirations.

That reminds me of a presentation I saw a little while back.

If you want to fight against people’s right to freely communicate and express themselves, be my guest, but it’s not a fight you can win.

Giving all people a tool to help them more effectively communicate, express themselves, learn, and come together is something everyone should get behind.

I firmly believe in the public’s right to access and use information, while acknowledging artists should retain specific rights over their creations. I also accept that the rights they don’t retain have always enabled ethical self-expression and productive dialogue.

Imagine if copyright owners had the power to simply remove whatever wasn’t profitable for them from existence. We’d be hindering critical functions such as critique, investigation, reverse engineering, and even the simple cataloging of knowledge. In place of all that good, we’d have an ideal world for those with money, tyrants, and all those who seek control, and the undermining of the free exchange of ideas.

Taking artists’ work without consent or compensation goes against the spirit of open source, though, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t. Making observations about others’ works is a well-established tool for any researchers, reviewers, and people inventing new works. A concept which work perfectly within the open source framework. That’s all these models are, original analysis of its training set in comparison with one another. Because it’s a step one must necessarily take when doing anything, doing this doesn’t require anyone’s permission and is itself a right we all have.

I’m not fighting for the extremely wealthy, I’m fighting for the existence of competitive open source models. Something that can’t happen with what you’ve proposed. That would just hand corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep up with the megacorporations that already own vast troves of data and can afford to buy even more.

This article by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries does a good job of explaining what I’m talking about.

I don’t think they have to, the point is to fight against regression of public rights for the benefit of the few.

So the question that comes to mind is exactly how, on a practical level, it would work to make sure that when a company scrapes data, trains and AI, and then makes billions of dollars, the thousands or millions of people who created the data all get a cut after the fact. Because particularly in the creative sector, a lot of people are freelancers who don’t have a specific employer they can go after. From a purely practical perspective, paying artists before the data is used makes sure all those freelancers get paid. Waiting until the company makes a profit, taxing it out of them, and then distributing it to artists doesn’t seem practical to me.

This isn’t labor law.

Creating same-y pieces with AI will not improve the material conditions of artists’ lives, either. All that does is drag everyone down in a race to the bottom on who can churn out the most dreck the most quickly. “If we advance the technology enough, everybody can have it on their device and make as much AI-generated crap as they like” does not secure stable futures for artists.

If you’re worried about labor issues, use labor law to improve your conditions. Don’t deny regular people access to a competitive, corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility for your monetary gain.

Art ain’t just a good; it’s self-expression, communication, inspiration, joy – rights that belong to every human being. The kind of people wanting to relegate such a significant part of the human experience to a domain where only the few can benefit aren’t the kind of people that want things to get better. They want to become the proverbial boot. The more people can participate in these conversations, the more we can all learn.

I understand that you are passionate about this topic, and that you have strong opinions. However, insults, and derisive language aren’t helping this discussion. They only create hostility and resentment, and undermine your credibility. If you’re interested, we can continue our discussion in good faith, but if your next comment is like this one, I won’t be replying.

The point is that It’s not an activity you can force someone to pay for. Everyone that can run models on their own can benefit, and that group can expand with time as research makes it more feasible on more devices. But that can never come to pass if we destroy the rights that allow us to make observations and analyze data.

counting words and measuring pixels are not activities that you should need permission to perform, with or without a computer, even if the person whose words or pixels you’re counting doesn’t want you to. You should be able to look as hard as you want at the pixels in Kate Middleton’s family photos, or track the rise and fall of the Oxford comma, and you shouldn’t need anyone’s permission to do so.

Creating an individual bargainable copyright over training will not improve the material conditions of artists’ lives – all it will do is change the relative shares of the value we create, shifting some of that value from tech companies that hate us and want us to starve to entertainment companies that hate us and want us to starve.

Cory Doctorow wrote a good article about this a little while back.

Have you tried any of the pixel fine-tunes on Civitai?

This one looks pretty good.

What models do you use?

If it’s the same one from a few months ago, the wording is so vague that only huge companies with legal departments will be able to navigate the compliance maze they’ve set up.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/generative-ai-policy-must-be-precise-careful-and-practical-how-cut-through-hype

At least it’s not Bandai, but it’s likely gacha since it’s releasing on the AppStore, GooglePlay, and Steam.

I saw an interesting video about image classifiers yesterday.

Check out Civitai for Stable Diffusion models. I’m not quite sure which model they are using, but you may be able to find something on there.

Also, there’s a Stable Diffusion community at [email protected]. If you make a thread there we can help you find what model they use or something similar.

SDNext can run Pixart-Σ.

The model should be capable of much better than this, but they spent a long time censoring the model before release and this is what we got. It straight up forgot most human anatomy.