Is Stability turning into OpenAI?
deep learning machine learning arxiv explained neural networks ai artificial intelligence paper stable diffusion stability ai stable diffusion subreddit stable diffusion discord runwayml runway ml stable-diffusion-webui automatic1111
#stablediffusion #aiart #openai 

Stability AI has stepped into some drama recently. They are accused of a hostile takeover of the community-led sub-reddits and Discord servers, of going after an alternative web UI, and of falsely dealing out IP takedown notices.

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Intro
2:40 - Stability takes over community Discord & Reddit
14:50 - AUTOMATIC1111 web UI, stolen or not ?
24:50 - Stable Diffusion 1.5 takedown request
31:20 - Scary: Stability CIO statement on safety & openness

References:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stability-ai-startup-behind-stable-170151950.html?guccounter=1
https://analyticsindiamag.com/when-stability-ai-went-rogue-on-reddit-rampage%ef%bf%bc/
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y12jo3/comment/irvsek2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
https://imgur.com/a/JjpRpmP
https://imgur.com/a/JjpRpmP
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y19kdh/mod_here_my_side_of_the_story/
https://imgur.com/a/TpTMr0S
https://imgur.com/a/zTae3hz
https://imgur.com/a/QDNA6cG
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y17xn1/emad_in_discord_right_now/
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y156op/new_mods_hijacked_this_sub_2_weeks_ago/
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y1nc7t/rstablediffusion_should_be_independent_and_run_by/
https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui-feature-showcase
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y34h2a/comment/isiymmj/?context=3
https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/discussions/2509
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y1uuvj/automatic1111_did_nothing_wrong_some_people_are/is298ix/?context=3
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/y22zg6/comment/is1h02a/
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y1uuvj/automatic1111_did_nothing_wrong_some_people_are/
https://imgur.com/a/Z2QsOEw
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y0uvps/automatic1111_removed_from_pinned_guide/
https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/discussions/1#6351a36ca9a9ae18220726c7
https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/why-the-future-of-open-source-ai

Links:
Homepage: https://ykilcher.com
Merch: https://ykilcher.com/merch
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/yannickilcher
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ykilcher
Discord: https://ykilcher.com/discord
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ykilcher

If you want to support me, the best thing to do is to share out the content :)

If you want to support me financially (completely optional and voluntary, but a lot of people have asked for this):
SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/yannickilcher
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/yannickilcher
Bitcoin (BTC): bc1q49lsw3q325tr58ygf8sudx2dqfguclvngvy2cq
Ethereum (ETH): 0x7ad3513E3B8f66799f507Aa7874b1B0eBC7F85e2
Litecoin (LTC): LQW2TRyKYetVC8WjFkhpPhtpbDM4Vw7r9m
Monero (XMR): 4ACL8AGrEo5hAir8A9CeVrW8pEauWvnp1WnSDZxW7tziCDLhZAGsgzhRQABDnFy8yuM9fWJDviJPHKRjV4FWt19CJZN9D4n
 Stability AI has a few growing pains in the recent weeks, they found themselves in multiple controversies. And we're going to look at them in detail today. Yahoo Finance writes Stability AI, the startup behind stable diffusion raises 101 million US dollars. Now I've done previously a video on stable diffusion, which is a new text image model that has been released open source free for everyone to access and use. And I've done a video on the great things that people build and are still building with it. It's absolutely amazing the creativity that comes out of people when you just give them stuff. And I've also done an interview with Ahmad Mustak, the founder of Stability AI, where he shared his opinions and an approach to sharing more. So according to him, Stability AI is goal is to be what open AI was supposed to be. These are my words, not his. Open AI was supposed to be this decentralized collaborative thing where everything is open and AI is made accessible to everyone. And it's ended up to be an API provider that you can, you know, call for money. Now, Stability AI has made the first step in releasing stable diffusion to the world open. And as I said, it's unleashed a big part of creativity. However, in recent weeks, they found themselves at the center of multiple controversies. So today we're going to go over four different instances of these controversies. First stability takes over the subreddit that's community led and the discord server that's community led kicking out all other mods. Second stability AI goes after a GitHub user that provides an alternative web UI to theirs and accuse them of stealing some code. But the truth is actually no, they stole code from him first or both actually took code from somewhere else. It's kind of a mess. Third stability issues a takedown notice for a model on the hugging face hub that they claim is their own intellectual property, namely stable diffusion version 1.5. And later, they take back that takedown notice. And lastly, their CIO releases a public statement about how they think about open sourcing models. And in my opinion, it's very, very scary statement. So we're going to go into these things in detail, as always, let me know what you think. As with all of these things, it's very hard to actually research all of what happened. And there are conflicting accounts of things and conflicting interpretations. So take what I say with a grain of salt, look at the stuff yourself and come to your own conclusions. So first of all, we have a story from analytics India mag that says when stability AI went rogue on Reddit rampage. A couple of days ago, stability AI infiltrated the stable diffusion community banned some of the users kicked out the moderators and took over the subreddit. This is some, you know, punchy headline. And actually, you know, this is this is my thumbnail. Source Reddit, I guess I've posted it on Reddit. I'm not sure. But I guess the comp it's a compliment since it's a good thumbnail. Well, this all started with posts on Reddit from former moderator saying, Hello, I'm an ex moderator of the subreddit and discord. And I've been here since the beginning. The subreddit was intended to be unofficial and run by the community. Two weeks ago, the first moderator was tricked into giving control of the subreddit and transferred to stability stability, meaning the company stability AI, all the moderators were also removed from here. And even the one who created the subreddit was kicked out of the team and banned. Now this raised some eyebrows. We also have this statement from another moderator saying mod here my side of the story. They say they are on very good terms with stability. They've done a lot for them. But they say I just don't see why I would hide what I know for any longer. They say they were here from the beginning 50 subscribers to the subreddit, they asked whether they could help moderate from then on there were like two moderators of the subreddit. They also made a discord server and both of these things quickly exploded as stable diffusion became burst into the mainstream. At one point, they say official stability staff came in clearly showed their interest in making the discord official. So this was both the discord and the subreddit were unofficial were just run by fans. And all of a sudden stability comes in and says, well, that's a cool community, you know, can we essentially make this our official discord server so far so good this happens. So the real inflection point seemed to be when they said the stable diffusion beta program so where people could actually try out the model on discord would be run on my discord server, the discord server quickly grew to 50k members, they even got the vanity link. And then they say something like a few days after which my server got the verified badge that discord gives to official servers. Weird, I thought since I the owner of the server never asked for the badge and am not officially affiliated with stability, I can only imagine a mod asked for it while they were conversing with discord pure speculation though. So now this unofficial discord that has been sort of kind of made official by the stability staff but was still owned by a non stability member is now given sort of the verified badge like this is like the blue checkmark on Twitter. This is the official server for stable diffusion or for stability. I guess stable diffusion is more accurate. The story goes on saying mere days later, it became clear that PR public relations I guess did not want me to hold a position that made me falsely seem like stability staff, I understood and informed them I'd be fine with giving away ownership, but that not being conventionally possible since the server has the verified badge now. So once the server is verified, you can't just transfer the server to someone else. This is to prevent abuse. Now I would guess the normal way to now transfer the server would be something like to go to discord and to ask them hey, could I transfer that server to these people? Yes, I verify I really want to do this, I verify they are the true owners of stability AI, the brand for which this discord server is the official discord server, yada yada yada. However, that did not happen. A few days later, I wake up to see I no longer own the discord server. Fact, I never reached out to discord and discord never reached out to me. So apparently discord just kind of transferred the server, I guess they were in contact with stability and stability made it appear like the two things are closer than they were. Obviously, this person was clearly willing to give up the server. And I guess stability communicated that to discord, but this core just didn't follow their process of actually asking the person, hey, do you really want to do that? So they just kind of took away the server from him and handed it over. Not that much of a big deal, but like a bit scary, right. So apparently later, the ownership was transferred back and someone that we can assume that is from stability called cyber bully said the ownership has been transferred to you following the post on Reddit since it was a big issue for you, you can now do the transfer to immat yourself and also a message from discord itself saying yes, indeed, there was a mix up and they should have come to this person and ask them whether they really wanted to transfer the discord and not just take it away from them. So it's kind of unclear whether discord themselves found that they've screwed up and then the cyber bully person just kind of reacted to that because it just says has been transferred to you or whether they've actually initiated it. To be honest, this also is it is like a bit passive aggressive. It's not like we're sorry, we clearly screwed up. So we're like, well, since you made a Reddit post and you know, since this is a big issue, it's actually a small issue. But since to you, you know, you make a big deal out of it fine diva, right, you can transfer it yourself. It's very much the attitude of like, oh, come on, it's not such a big deal. Like, it kind of is a big deal. There's two levels here, right? Level one screw up happened probably by discord. Okay, we can we get it right? Like this stuff happens. But level two is sort of the the tone, which I don't think is quite appropriate to to be like, this top down. And then apparently later without any doing at all, they've taken the discord server away again saying hi all apologies for this, we've transferred ownership back to him and revisiting our process of transferring ownership to ensure this does not happen again. All in all, it seems pretty clear the discord server should have transferred ownership in one way or another. The process was a bit dirty and cyberbully was just kind of being a dick. But the story doesn't end there. Moving to the subreddit, this mod says I had taken ownership of the subreddit a week before since stability wanted someone more trustworthy to hold that position. Then however, someone from stability security department contacted me and asked me to transfer ownership to actual stability staff given stability has been awesome to me so far and promising me great opportunities in the future I complied it they like it'd be funny if they just use that exact wording like great opportunities away to you young lad I guess they've said you know we can do something for you in the future you've been pretty cool. Administrating this as a volunteer they say promising the original owner and other mods to retain a mod position they never followed through with that and only invited one person and me back as a mod without giving them full permissions that's how we arrive at the present day I did try to warn them about holding corporate motivated positions on a sub that did not seem to phase them though so that's where the sentence before came in where they say they tricked someone into giving them permissions they essentially came in and said hey um we are you know the real deal we would like to administrate this subreddit that is about us even though reddit is sort of supposed to be in this sort of fan mode so subreddits are supposed to be unaffiliated with the thing they're about because it's supposed to be community led but you know you can all decide that for yourself essentially they came in and said we would like to take control here that's okay the person said yes you're very cool that's okay if you know we can stay on as moderators and the other moderators too they said yes and then they just didn't so people got a bit upset about these things but you know always remember there's probably always two sides at least two sides to every story there is a discord message from a mod himself saying just getting information now as catching up seems like we wanted to give mods non-public data so there was an nda system in place and some mods say yay some mods say nay and he doesn't exactly know what's going on so far on top of that there's also something that i just i just heard okay i don't have a way to confirm this but the person the moderator we just heard from is a minor not of legal age right now that that's not the the rumor the rumor is that then at some point they actually got on payroll of stability so that they would count as an employee so that they would fall sort of under employee secrecy and stuff i don't know again i don't know what happened what is public is the fact that the moderators were switched out the moderators that were swapped in they did not have long-lasting reddit accounts they did not have experience as moderators and it very much seemed like there was some sort of switcheroo happening and promises made that were then not fulfilled now all of this does have a bit of a happy end as david ha actually joined stability ai as the head of strategy you may know david ha also from his username hardmaru on reddit and twitter he's very active he always has the absolute best prompts for text to image models i very much enjoy following him and he is from what i can tell a very straightforward and trustworthy person so i'm very happy that someone like this is in a leading role in such a kind of new and wild company so he himself actually on his first day of work or his second day of work posted a post in the stable diffusion subreddit saying yes actually this should go back to the community he says stability ai is a young company needs to learn how to engage on social media he personally joined the sub earlier this year he believes that stable diffusion should be independent and run by the community stability ai will give up all control of this sub including mod privileges this company is built around our community and want to keep it that way going forward we will engage with this community as regular users when we respond to concerns inquiries or make new announcements and so ownership was transferred back to the original moderators after this as for the discord server i believe they are still in control of that which i guess is fine since it is actually the official discord server so where does that leave us with all of these stories you can interpret it in many different ways on one end of the spectrum which is very much where i fall i think what happened is that stability ai has just kind of exploded in recent years they have or years days weeks right they have just gotten so much publicity at once and they have had to hire in people they've had to react fast to things and probably the culture in this company is also the sort of decentralized way that they feel the entire ai world should run so i'm going to guess that a lot of people with instability have gotten sort of a lot of freedom and power very very quickly and sort of the instructions to just make things happen and do things and decide for yourself and be kind of a pirate and a bit radical right and therefore quick rash decisions were made which were probably not in the interest of the company or the community if they had thought longer about it so i'm very much at the end of the spectrum that says that these are essentially growing pains mixed in a few people that don't really have experience with their kind of power and the kind of reach that they have right now on the other end of the spectrum you can always of course say that this is an evil company it's been an evil company from the start they're looking to make money they're looking to control everything can't tell you which one is the case i'm just tending towards one end of the spectrum which brings us to the next bit of drama which is automatic's web ui so automatic 1111 is a person username on github on reddit on fourchan i believe and they made a web ui for stable diffusion an alternative to the dream studio that is the official web ui by stability ai and this is the most extensive alternative web ui and a lot of people have been using automatic's web ui for doing things it's really cool it's just open you can just download it now there are some initial issues with this as you can see right here there is not really a license to it so even though it's kind of open it's not really open source at least not in a sense where we would actually know how we could use this stuff but in any case here is a showcase you can do lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of stuff so automatic seemed to just have been scouring the internet for things to do with these diffusion models and then incorporating them more and more and more into the web ui and it ended up with a lot of features being very usable and therefore a lot of people used it now what happens from here is a bit shady and unclear i've tried to piece together the timeline and what was very helpful are some of the summary posts that exist on reddit for example in out of the loop the user ttop e has a lengthy post on what happened and so does the user sims boy on the stable diffusion sub reddit they have sort of a step-by-step breakdown a good point to dive in our set of discord messages apparently from someone named ether that is from stability ai supposedly at least from the stable diffusion discord server that texted to automatic hello i'm reaching out to you from the stable diffusion server in regard to the recent novel ai leaks now these leaks have been leaking proprietary material of this company novel ai novel ai is a company that is in some way connected to stability ai either they're just backed by them with compute they get like early access to their systems and things like this so these two are sort of connected stability and novel ai now novel ai had apparently been building some features as closed source features this is cool you can do this now this had been leaked there's been an exploit that allowed hackers to gain access to proprietary material by novel ai specifically they have leaked out some model that novel ai has been developing that was then passed around the internet now automatic giving that they have a web ui that a lot of people use rushed to make the web ui compatible with the leaked model so they didn't just incorporate the leaked model or you know hacked it themselves i guess who knows but there's no proof they hacked it themselves they simply made their web ui compatible with that now in order to make that compatible they obviously also had to incorporate some code now there are multiple different layers here but let's go on with the messages it has come to our attention that some of your recent commits contain code that could have only been written by looking at leaked proprietary code confirmed by a core developer who had worked on that code we're asking you to please remove any recent additions containing that code from your repository given that this data has been unlawfully leaked on 4chan and is not intended to be open source we cannot align with these actions and have had to remove your stable society role within the server thank you automatic replies to this the code has been written by me from scratch loading vae is basics of basics and hyper networks is also a technique that has been demonstrated long ago i do not see why i should remove those just because leaked code exists if you want to remove me from your roles you're free to do so hello by the way hello again after review and discussion with our team i've made the decision to ban you from the stable diffusion server on the grounds of unethical community participation around the recent novel ai leaks sure whatever all right so now it sounds like proprietary code from novel ai has been found in automatic's repository and they asked them to remove that now in fact there is a tiny bit of truth to that as automatic themselves say right here from line 44 to line 55 is copied verbatim from the novel ai code base however it's just dead code it's been there for a total of two commits and it was removed after that and it still runs everything as said they didn't actually refer to these lines of code when they accused them of stealing code but they refer to other lines of code now comes the kicker this summary post states however it was soon pointed out that this code the one they accused automatic of stealing predated novel ai's implementation and was open source making automatic innocent of thievery it was then pointed out that novel ai was using code taken from automatic that was not open source making them the actual thieves in this situation so they started out accusing automatic of stealing their code turns out they've actually both taken that code from some open source repository and since automatic doesn't have any sort of open source license technically the code from the web ui isn't open source and they've actually taken code from that repository and yeah so ultimately they're in violation of the license they blamed it on an intern however the pull of this code on github had the name of a senior programmer within novel ai casting doubts on the it was an intern excuse oh it was an intern of course of course it was an intern sure sure i mean even if it was an intern right they are out there attacking and like an independent volunteer creator that sort of keeps half of these stable diffusion interactions of the world going i guess like a paid intern is still laden with more responsibility than some sort of volunteer that just puts their stuff on github yet they have no problem attacking that volunteer yet when it comes to them it's like oh oh it was an oh i mean so automatic was exiled from the discord server removed from the pinned guide on the stable diffusion subreddit i'm gonna guess that's when the uh company still had control over it and just kind of been treated at the side now it's not all clear cut as i said automatic had actually copied code even though it was it was dead code and it was removed right away and they weren't talking about that code but still it's not super clear cut and also if you know the company probably wants to take a stance against including sort of a leaked material into web uis because they don't want to be seen that they want to comply with that by having this in sort of the pinned sidebar you know if you're a company and your proprietary property is out there somewhere leaked and you kind of want to prohibit that but then you have like a link to a web ui that says here is how you can use the leaked thing just kind of looks bit so i can understand why they sort of want to distance themselves but you know they could just say like you know we don't support the inclusion of sort of the leaked model into that web ui they didn't have to go super hard after him especially especially if it if it was wrong right if it then turned out no actually they both just took open source code and they had actually stolen from automatic in any case later a discussion post was opened on automatics github repository saying hi automatic this is a mod from stability ai posting here as this is where you spend most of your time so this is an apology apologize for their manner which my actions hurt the hurt they may have caused should have reached out to you and talked to you before and it's it's just like it's it's an apology it's uh apology saying we're sorry about this however the the account it i mean it's just called e stability and on the reddit post that references this apology automatic comments saying like you guys are a little bit gullible and when asked to explain they say the apology is a joke post by a random person who made a fake account and my response to it is also a joke so the response was this come on a mod you already apologized in person over the tea yesterday there is no need for this so this apparently is sarcasm now i have heard but also couldn't confirm that a mod actually said that yes this was indeed him and this was indeed a real sincere apology and to this day i i don't know whether it's true or not so i can neither confirm nor deny that as they say in court i guess and i do believe with the sort of reversion back to community led subreddit automatics webui is again a pinned link there however again you can ask yourself you know which side of the spectrum are you on is this an evil company that sees a competing webui and just wants to take out the creator because it's become more popular than their own webui or again is this a company where too many people have gotten too much power and being told you know just do things we'll do things in a decentralized way we're kind of radical so just do stuff and they just go about it with a bit too much force and a bit too little thought it happens you know i can tell stories of this again i'm going to be leaning on the side of just a bit more chaos than just deliberate evilness given also from the fact that they've never before accused automatic of any sort of bad behavior or anything like this like they weren't openly hostile to automatic beforehand so there's no indication that they were unhappy that this webui was gaining a lot of traction now again you could be saying well this is all strategic and so on i'm not sure never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence but now we get to the last bit and that's the release of stable diffusion 1.5 stable diffusion is a model that has seen a number of updates in sort of recent weeks and stable diffusion 1.5 is the next iteration in that line now as you can see here it was released on the hogging face hub by not stability ai but by runway ml now stable diffusion even though stability ai sort of puts themselves behind it is actually a conglomeration by many people building on research that has been open sourced and published before all the code is sort of like a melting pot of different things that exist and then maybe some engineering tricks on top of that so with these open source things it's hard to say who actually owns what now apparently stability had wanted to hold back version 1.5 until they are ready to release it whereas runway ml which is a company that makes creative tools makes image editors and video editors that are based on ai has one been wanting to release this so they have released it and after they've released it stability ai has requested a takedown of this published model characterizing it as a leak of their ip ip being intellectual property not internet protocol in this case so to this takedown request runway ml had actually decided to officially communicate on this discussion thread saying chris here ceo and co-founder of runway since our founding in 2018 we've been on a mission to empower anyone to create the impossible we're excited to share this newest version of stable diffusion so that we can continue delivering our mission this version of stable diffusion is a continuation of the original high resolution image synthesis with latent diffusion models work that we created and published and now more commonly referred to as stable diffusion so stable diffusion comes from a line of published research and the researchers that had been working on this paper at least partially are now part of runway ml stable diffusion is an ai model developed by patrick esser from runway and robin rumbach from lmu munich the research and code behind stable diffusion was open sourced last year the model was released under the creative ml open rail m license we confirm there has been no breach of ip as flagged and we thank stability ai for the compute donation to retrain the original model so essentially this is like it's like also formulated a bit passive aggressively here but i think chris has every reason to do so essentially saying that nope all the code has existed we actually authored that code or part of us authored that code it's all open source it's all there the model that we've retrained is actually under an open source license so absolutely no claim to ip can be laid here to stability saying that they essentially just provided the compute to retrain the original model and simply providing the compute does not make them the owner of the ip now i am not a lawyer this is not legal advice i don't know what the exact legal situation is right here but it does make a lot of sense to me that they essentially say like wait you know all of this stuff is open source so we can retrain this stuff just as much as you can and it's not like they have retrained you know two things it's not like runway ml and stability have both worked on a version 1.5 or something it seems like stability was the compute giver to runway to actually develop the official 1.5 of stable diffusion and then as far as i can tell from the conversations and speculation around it again this is all speculation it was such that stability wanted to kind of hold back that release while runway wanted to release it and in the end i guess runway decided let's release it because you know legally there's nothing they can do side note see this edited four days ago a lot of these things are edited including like the official thing right here now this says edit right here but for the other ones like i don't like what's what are the edits i can't see like as much as it's cool to have public discussions on the hogging face hop like i really need to see how they edited stuff because you know otherwise how are you gonna know what happened like i'll just insert like some empty posts every now and then and then later i can go on and edit them to say anything i want well in any case there is a lot of discussion following right here however stability never officially said anything here in this open discussion however as julian says in the original post in the edit stability legal team reached out to hogging face reverting the initial takedown request therefore we close this thread so the model stays up and running under runway ml as stable diffusion version 1.5 and again you can ask yourself big evil company that is trying to you know make money therefore keep the models to themselves not wanting someone else to release them maybe on the other hand was this kind of a rash decision to issue this takedown request when clearly i guess they didn't really have claims and even if it like makes them look really really really bad yes on on that too so again i don't really know i also don't exactly know what happened right here stability ai certainly has associated themselves heavily with the name stable diffusion but to what degree stable diffusion is actually a product of stability ai whether they have rights or not for giving compute how much they've actually worked on it all of this is quite in transparent on top of that a lot of this stuff if not all is actually open source the code is open source the data is open source the models that serve as checkpoints maybe are open source and therefore you can also ask yourselves well if i take stable diffusion 1.5 and to train it for a bit more can i just call it stable diffusion 1.6 is there a trademark or something on it is this now a public word all of these questions are completely open as i can say in none of these situations stability ai has necessarily made the popular choice whether it's like an evil or a good choice that's you know a question that you might want to ask i lean towards it was more speed incompetence and pirate mentality that sort of made them screw up a couple of times rather than evilness however now comes the actual scary part so this is a post from daniel jeffries who is the cio of stable diffusion the post is called why the future of open source ai is so much bigger than stable diffusion 1.5 and why it matters to you this is a post in part justifying why they wanted to keep to hold back the release of stable diffusion 1.5 daniel jeffries is as i said the cio and the post is very much written from the perspective of stability ai saying all of it all the time saying we you know we have taken a step back at stability ai so this is definitely speaking from the perspective of the company and not just a personal opinion now if you've watched my interview with a mod a mod had very much the attitude of yeah we'll just release the stuff you know if people want to do weird things with it then so be it right in fact the tool is only useful if you can do good and bad things with it and you know i think the last weeks have demonstrated clearly the benefits of releasing these things to the public clearly much more good has come out of this than bad has come out of it and the bad that would have been prevented by you know putting the model behind an api i'm not sure that that much bad has been prevented in any case guess why guess what the reasoning of daniel jeffries is why they wanted to hold back stable diffusion 1.5 we've heard from regulators and the general public that we need to focus more strongly on security to ensure that we're taking all the steps possible to make sure that people don't use stable diffusion for illegal purposes or hurting people yes hurting people it's like completely open ai again open ai starting out we want to be open we want to democratize we want to bring this to everyone and then they're like ah but we need to make sure it's safe like it can't be safe the definition of a useful tool means you can use it which means you can also use it for bad if you can use it for anything at all it's possible to be used for bad and it's the same mentality the mentality is we know what's good for you so we keep this to ourselves and once we have determined what's you know that it's appropriate then you plebs you can have it and we're going to form foundations to make it seem like we're a non-profit open ai is ruled by a non-profit i mean the company itself is limited profit and it's you know a hold held by a non-profit and we are going to form committees of experts and and you know everyone can take no like no it's the exact same thing again we know what's good for you we are the elite we know and you know you don't so we can't trust you to make these decisions because think of the children the blog post is also filled with statements such as we also won't stand by quietly when other groups leak the model in order to draw some quick press to themselves while trying to wash their hands of responsibility like tell me this doesn't sound exactly like open ai like or like the journalists that came after this model and sentences like we are committed to open source at our very core like no you're not you're you're not like if if you believe that you first do things and then only once you've determined it's it's good for the plebs then you release it you're not committed to open source at your very core you are not of the attitude that people should have access to the tools and should have self-determination of what to do with them because before long you will discover in fact that there's not possible to release a model that is safe enough the only possibility is in fact to put it behind an api and filter the queries and filter the outputs and don't let people put bad words into that thing and you know have terms of services that prohibit people from doing anything at all except building a rainbow world around the model where nothing bad ever happens and at that point it will become useless lastly again you have the choice of believing obviously stability it was just all the trick and they're exactly the same as open ai because clearly one of their senior officials says so the other possibility that i want to suggest to you is very much also the same as i said before this thing grew it grew very quickly and it is very well possible that emad had to hire a lot of people including this person who has a completely opposite opinion of anything that stability ai and open ai in its real sense stands for and has just kind of let these people run loose a little bit and all we can hope for is that either gets a better grip on these people or that the community steps up and essentially makes daniel jeffries and similar people have a change of hearts and if there is a third possibility and then that is that regulators are making so much pressure on these people that they're essentially forced into this track well in this case i can only hope that you know stability ai finds themselves in a situation where they don't comply where they say no we are going to release stuff and we're not just going to lay down flat when the european union or california comes in and enacts regulation just because people can do bad stuff with things we'll find a different way of distributing these things we'll find a different way of getting people access and we are not going to just stop innovating and stop releasing and we are not going to centralize power and putting everything behind an api until it's squeaky clean or no longer useful remember what open ai said about gpt2 not three gpt2 they delayed the release of the model due to its potential of abuse now we look back now and we know that this is completely bogus in no there is no way gpt2 has any serious potential for abuse and in fact no one has abused it there has been not really any significant demonstration of its abuse now you can say good fear open ai didn't know at the moment but also that was the point of gpt2 was the point in time where the strategy was invented of claiming that due to security concerns we're not going to release this to the public we're going to keep this for ourselves until we tested it and now gpt2 can be found on the hugging face hub but after a couple of years after all of this i don't know what the conclusion is i don't know what to tell you what i can say is that i really really hope that stability will get back on track and regain its commitment and its outlook on being open being community driven being decentralized and you know releasing their stuff now i'm not saying they have any obligation to do so they're a company they're absolutely entitled to just say nope actually we want to make money and we build our closed source models like that's fine but it's just not in compliance with what they claim to be and i very much hope that there is someone on this planet that is like they claim to be open decentralized and sharing whatever happens we'll keep a very close eye on this and i'll see you next time bye bye you
 Stability AI has a few growing pains in the recent weeks, they found themselves in multiple
 controversies. And we're going to look at them in detail today. Yahoo Finance writes Stability AI,
 the startup behind stable diffusion raises 101 million US dollars. Now I've done previously a
 video on stable diffusion, which is a new text image model that has been released open source
 free for everyone to access and use. And I've done a video on the great things that people build and
 are still building with it. It's absolutely amazing the creativity that comes out of people
 when you just give them stuff. And I've also done an interview with Ahmad Mustak, the founder of
 Stability AI, where he shared his opinions and an approach to sharing more. So according to him,
 Stability AI is goal is to be what open AI was supposed to be. These are my words, not his.
 Open AI was supposed to be this decentralized collaborative thing where everything is open and
 AI is made accessible to everyone. And it's ended up to be an API provider that you can, you know,
 call for money. Now, Stability AI has made the first step in releasing stable diffusion to the
 world open. And as I said, it's unleashed a big part of creativity. However, in recent weeks,
 they found themselves at the center of multiple controversies. So today we're going to go over
 four different instances of these controversies. First stability takes over the subreddit that's
 community led and the discord server that's community led kicking out all other mods.
 Second stability AI goes after a GitHub user that provides an alternative web UI to theirs
 and accuse them of stealing some code. But the truth is actually no, they stole code from him
 first or both actually took code from somewhere else. It's kind of a mess. Third stability issues
 a takedown notice for a model on the hugging face hub that they claim is their own intellectual
 property, namely stable diffusion version 1.5. And later, they take back that takedown notice.
 And lastly, their CIO releases a public statement about how they think about open sourcing models.
 And in my opinion, it's very, very scary statement. So we're going to go into these things in detail,
 as always, let me know what you think. As with all of these things, it's very hard to actually
 research all of what happened. And there are conflicting accounts of things and conflicting
 interpretations. So take what I say with a grain of salt, look at the stuff yourself and come to
 your own conclusions. So first of all, we have a story from analytics India mag that says when
 stability AI went rogue on Reddit rampage. A couple of days ago, stability AI infiltrated the stable
 diffusion community banned some of the users kicked out the moderators and took over the subreddit.
 This is some, you know, punchy headline. And actually, you know, this is this is my thumbnail.
 Source Reddit, I guess I've posted it on Reddit. I'm not sure. But I guess the comp it's a
 compliment since it's a good thumbnail. Well, this all started with posts on Reddit from former
 moderator saying, Hello, I'm an ex moderator of the subreddit and discord. And I've been here
 since the beginning. The subreddit was intended to be unofficial and run by the community.
 Two weeks ago, the first moderator was tricked into giving control of the subreddit and transferred
 to stability stability, meaning the company stability AI, all the moderators were also removed
 from here. And even the one who created the subreddit was kicked out of the team and banned. Now
 this raised some eyebrows. We also have this statement from another moderator saying mod here
 my side of the story. They say they are on very good terms with stability. They've done a lot for
 them. But they say I just don't see why I would hide what I know for any longer. They say they
 were here from the beginning 50 subscribers to the subreddit, they asked whether they could help
 moderate from then on there were like two moderators of the subreddit. They also made a
 discord server and both of these things quickly exploded as stable diffusion became burst into
 the mainstream. At one point, they say official stability staff came in clearly showed their
 interest in making the discord official. So this was both the discord and the subreddit were
 unofficial were just run by fans. And all of a sudden stability comes in and says, well,
 that's a cool community, you know, can we essentially make this our official discord
 server so far so good this happens. So the real inflection point seemed to be when they said the
 stable diffusion beta program so where people could actually try out the model on discord would be
 run on my discord server, the discord server quickly grew to 50k members, they even got the
 vanity link. And then they say something like a few days after which my server got the verified
 badge that discord gives to official servers. Weird, I thought since I the owner of the server
 never asked for the badge and am not officially affiliated with stability, I can only imagine a
 mod asked for it while they were conversing with discord pure speculation though. So now this
 unofficial discord that has been sort of kind of made official by the stability staff but was still
 owned by a non stability member is now given sort of the verified badge like this is like the blue
 checkmark on Twitter. This is the official server for stable diffusion or for stability. I guess
 stable diffusion is more accurate. The story goes on saying mere days later, it became clear that
 PR public relations I guess did not want me to hold a position that made me falsely seem like
 stability staff, I understood and informed them I'd be fine with giving away ownership, but that
 not being conventionally possible since the server has the verified badge now. So once the server is
 verified, you can't just transfer the server to someone else. This is to prevent abuse. Now I would
 guess the normal way to now transfer the server would be something like to go to discord and to
 ask them hey, could I transfer that server to these people? Yes, I verify I really want to do this,
 I verify they are the true owners of stability AI, the brand for which this discord server is
 the official discord server, yada yada yada. However, that did not happen. A few days later,
 I wake up to see I no longer own the discord server. Fact, I never reached out to discord
 and discord never reached out to me. So apparently discord just kind of transferred the server,
 I guess they were in contact with stability and stability made it appear like the two things are
 closer than they were. Obviously, this person was clearly willing to give up the server. And I guess
 stability communicated that to discord, but this core just didn't follow their process of actually
 asking the person, hey, do you really want to do that? So they just kind of took away the server
 from him and handed it over. Not that much of a big deal, but like a bit scary, right. So apparently
 later, the ownership was transferred back and someone that we can assume that is from stability
 called cyber bully said the ownership has been transferred to you following the post on Reddit
 since it was a big issue for you, you can now do the transfer to immat yourself and also a message
 from discord itself saying yes, indeed, there was a mix up and they should have come to this person
 and ask them whether they really wanted to transfer the discord and not just take it away from them.
 So it's kind of unclear whether discord themselves found that they've screwed up and then the cyber
 bully person just kind of reacted to that because it just says has been transferred to you or
 whether they've actually initiated it. To be honest, this also is it is like a bit passive aggressive.
 It's not like we're sorry, we clearly screwed up. So we're like, well, since you made a Reddit post
 and you know, since this is a big issue, it's actually a small issue. But since to you,
 you know, you make a big deal out of it fine diva, right, you can transfer it yourself.
 It's very much the attitude of like, oh, come on, it's not such a big deal. Like,
 it kind of is a big deal. There's two levels here, right? Level one screw up happened probably by
 discord. Okay, we can we get it right? Like this stuff happens. But level two is sort of the the
 tone, which I don't think is quite appropriate to to be like, this top down. And then apparently
 later without any doing at all, they've taken the discord server away again saying hi all apologies
 for this, we've transferred ownership back to him and revisiting our process of transferring
 ownership to ensure this does not happen again. All in all, it seems pretty clear the discord
 server should have transferred ownership in one way or another. The process was a bit dirty and
 cyberbully was just kind of being a dick. But the story doesn't end there. Moving to the subreddit,
 this mod says I had taken ownership of the subreddit a week before since stability wanted
 someone more trustworthy to hold that position. Then however, someone from stability security
 department contacted me and asked me to transfer ownership to actual stability staff given stability
 has been awesome to me so far and promising me great opportunities in the future I complied
 it they like it'd be funny if they just use that exact wording like great opportunities away to you
 young lad I guess they've said you know we can do something for you in the future you've been pretty
 cool. Administrating this as a volunteer they say promising the original owner and other mods to
 retain a mod position they never followed through with that and only invited one person and me
 back as a mod without giving them full permissions that's how we arrive at the present day I did try
 to warn them about holding corporate motivated positions on a sub that did not seem to phase
 them though so that's where the sentence before came in where they say they tricked someone into
 giving them permissions they essentially came in and said hey um we are you know the real deal
 we would like to administrate this subreddit that is about us even though reddit is sort of supposed
 to be in this sort of fan mode so subreddits are supposed to be unaffiliated with the thing they're
 about because it's supposed to be community led but you know you can all decide that for yourself
 essentially they came in and said we would like to take control here that's okay the person said yes
 you're very cool that's okay if you know we can stay on as moderators and the other moderators too
 they said yes and then they just didn't so people got a bit upset about these things but you know
 always remember there's probably always two sides at least two sides to every story there is a
 discord message from a mod himself saying just getting information now as catching up seems like
 we wanted to give mods non-public data so there was an nda system in place and some mods say yay
 some mods say nay and he doesn't exactly know what's going on so far on top of that there's
 also something that i just i just heard okay i don't have a way to confirm this but the person
 the moderator we just heard from is a minor not of legal age right now that that's not the the
 rumor the rumor is that then at some point they actually got on payroll of stability so that they
 would count as an employee so that they would fall sort of under employee secrecy and stuff i don't
 know again i don't know what happened what is public is the fact that the moderators were
 switched out the moderators that were swapped in they did not have long-lasting reddit accounts
 they did not have experience as moderators and it very much seemed like there was some sort of
 switcheroo happening and promises made that were then not fulfilled now all of this does have a bit
 of a happy end as david ha actually joined stability ai as the head of strategy you may
 know david ha also from his username hardmaru on reddit and twitter he's very active he always has
 the absolute best prompts for text to image models i very much enjoy following him and he is from
 what i can tell a very straightforward and trustworthy person so i'm very happy that someone
 like this is in a leading role in such a kind of new and wild company so he himself actually on his
 first day of work or his second day of work posted a post in the stable diffusion subreddit saying
 yes actually this should go back to the community he says stability ai is a young company needs to
 learn how to engage on social media he personally joined the sub earlier this year he believes that
 stable diffusion should be independent and run by the community stability ai will give up all
 control of this sub including mod privileges this company is built around our community and want to
 keep it that way going forward we will engage with this community as regular users when we respond
 to concerns inquiries or make new announcements and so ownership was transferred back to the
 original moderators after this as for the discord server i believe they are still in control of that
 which i guess is fine since it is actually the official discord server so where does that leave
 us with all of these stories you can interpret it in many different ways on one end of the spectrum
 which is very much where i fall i think what happened is that stability ai has just kind of
 exploded in recent years they have or years days weeks right they have just gotten so much publicity
 at once and they have had to hire in people they've had to react fast to things and probably the
 culture in this company is also the sort of decentralized way that they feel the entire
 ai world should run so i'm going to guess that a lot of people with instability have gotten sort of
 a lot of freedom and power very very quickly and sort of the instructions to just make things happen
 and do things and decide for yourself and be kind of a pirate and a bit radical right and therefore
 quick rash decisions were made which were probably not in the interest of the company or the community
 if they had thought longer about it so i'm very much at the end of the spectrum that says that
 these are essentially growing pains mixed in a few people that don't really have experience with
 their kind of power and the kind of reach that they have right now on the other end of the spectrum
 you can always of course say that this is an evil company it's been an evil company from the start
 they're looking to make money they're looking to control everything can't tell you which one is the
 case i'm just tending towards one end of the spectrum which brings us to the next bit of drama
 which is automatic's web ui so automatic 1111 is a person username on github on reddit on fourchan
 i believe and they made a web ui for stable diffusion an alternative to the dream studio
 that is the official web ui by stability ai and this is the most extensive alternative web ui and
 a lot of people have been using automatic's web ui for doing things it's really cool it's just open
 you can just download it now there are some initial issues with this as you can see right here there
 is not really a license to it so even though it's kind of open it's not really open source at least
 not in a sense where we would actually know how we could use this stuff but in any case here is
 a showcase you can do lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of stuff so automatic seemed
 to just have been scouring the internet for things to do with these diffusion models and then
 incorporating them more and more and more into the web ui and it ended up with a lot of features
 being very usable and therefore a lot of people used it now what happens from here is a bit shady
 and unclear i've tried to piece together the timeline and what was very helpful are some of
 the summary posts that exist on reddit for example in out of the loop the user ttop e has a lengthy
 post on what happened and so does the user sims boy on the stable diffusion sub reddit they have
 sort of a step-by-step breakdown a good point to dive in our set of discord messages apparently
 from someone named ether that is from stability ai supposedly at least from the stable diffusion
 discord server that texted to automatic hello i'm reaching out to you from the stable diffusion
 server in regard to the recent novel ai leaks now these leaks have been leaking proprietary material
 of this company novel ai novel ai is a company that is in some way connected to stability ai
 either they're just backed by them with compute they get like early access to their systems and
 things like this so these two are sort of connected stability and novel ai now novel ai had apparently
 been building some features as closed source features this is cool you can do this now this
 had been leaked there's been an exploit that allowed hackers to gain access to proprietary
 material by novel ai specifically they have leaked out some model that novel ai has been
 developing that was then passed around the internet now automatic giving that they have a web ui that
 a lot of people use rushed to make the web ui compatible with the leaked model so they didn't
 just incorporate the leaked model or you know hacked it themselves i guess who knows but there's
 no proof they hacked it themselves they simply made their web ui compatible with that now in
 order to make that compatible they obviously also had to incorporate some code now there are
 multiple different layers here but let's go on with the messages it has come to our attention
 that some of your recent commits contain code that could have only been written by looking at leaked
 proprietary code confirmed by a core developer who had worked on that code we're asking you to please
 remove any recent additions containing that code from your repository given that this data has been
 unlawfully leaked on 4chan and is not intended to be open source we cannot align with these actions
 and have had to remove your stable society role within the server thank you automatic replies to
 this the code has been written by me from scratch loading vae is basics of basics and hyper networks
 is also a technique that has been demonstrated long ago i do not see why i should remove those
 just because leaked code exists if you want to remove me from your roles you're free to do so
 hello by the way hello again after review and discussion with our team i've made the decision
 to ban you from the stable diffusion server on the grounds of unethical community participation
 around the recent novel ai leaks sure whatever all right so now it sounds like proprietary code from
 novel ai has been found in automatic's repository and they asked them to remove that now in fact
 there is a tiny bit of truth to that as automatic themselves say right here from line 44 to line 55
 is copied verbatim from the novel ai code base however it's just dead code it's been there for
 a total of two commits and it was removed after that and it still runs everything as said they
 didn't actually refer to these lines of code when they accused them of stealing code but they refer
 to other lines of code now comes the kicker this summary post states however it was soon pointed
 out that this code the one they accused automatic of stealing predated novel ai's implementation
 and was open source making automatic innocent of thievery it was then pointed out that novel ai
 was using code taken from automatic that was not open source making them the actual thieves in this
 situation so they started out accusing automatic of stealing their code turns out they've actually
 both taken that code from some open source repository and since automatic doesn't have any sort of open
 source license technically the code from the web ui isn't open source and they've actually taken
 code from that repository and yeah so ultimately they're in violation of the license they blamed
 it on an intern however the pull of this code on github had the name of a senior programmer within
 novel ai casting doubts on the it was an intern excuse oh it was an intern of course of course
 it was an intern sure sure i mean even if it was an intern right they are out there attacking and
 like an independent volunteer creator that sort of keeps half of these stable diffusion interactions
 of the world going i guess like a paid intern is still laden with more responsibility than some sort
 of volunteer that just puts their stuff on github yet they have no problem attacking that volunteer
 yet when it comes to them it's like oh oh it was an oh i mean so automatic was exiled from the
 discord server removed from the pinned guide on the stable diffusion subreddit i'm gonna guess
 that's when the uh company still had control over it and just kind of been treated at the side now
 it's not all clear cut as i said automatic had actually copied code even though it was it was
 dead code and it was removed right away and they weren't talking about that code but still it's not
 super clear cut and also if you know the company probably wants to take a stance against including
 sort of a leaked material into web uis because they don't want to be seen that they want to comply
 with that by having this in sort of the pinned sidebar you know if you're a company and your
 proprietary property is out there somewhere leaked and you kind of want to prohibit that but then you
 have like a link to a web ui that says here is how you can use the leaked thing just kind of looks
 bit so i can understand why they sort of want to distance themselves but you know they could just
 say like you know we don't support the inclusion of sort of the leaked model into that web ui they
 didn't have to go super hard after him especially especially if it if it was wrong right if it then
 turned out no actually they both just took open source code and they had actually stolen from
 automatic in any case later a discussion post was opened on automatics github repository saying
 hi automatic this is a mod from stability ai posting here as this is where you spend most of
 your time so this is an apology apologize for their manner which my actions hurt the hurt they
 may have caused should have reached out to you and talked to you before and it's it's just like it's
 it's an apology it's uh apology saying we're sorry about this however the the account it i mean it's
 just called e stability and on the reddit post that references this apology automatic comments
 saying like you guys are a little bit gullible and when asked to explain they say the apology is a
 joke post by a random person who made a fake account and my response to it is also a joke so
 the response was this come on a mod you already apologized in person over the tea yesterday there
 is no need for this so this apparently is sarcasm now i have heard but also couldn't confirm that
 a mod actually said that yes this was indeed him and this was indeed a real sincere apology and to
 this day i i don't know whether it's true or not so i can neither confirm nor deny that as they say
 in court i guess and i do believe with the sort of reversion back to community led subreddit
 automatics webui is again a pinned link there however again you can ask yourself you know which
 side of the spectrum are you on is this an evil company that sees a competing webui and just wants
 to take out the creator because it's become more popular than their own webui or again is this a
 company where too many people have gotten too much power and being told you know just do things we'll
 do things in a decentralized way we're kind of radical so just do stuff and they just go about
 it with a bit too much force and a bit too little thought it happens you know i can tell stories of
 this again i'm going to be leaning on the side of just a bit more chaos than just deliberate
 evilness given also from the fact that they've never before accused automatic of any sort of bad
 behavior or anything like this like they weren't openly hostile to automatic beforehand so there's
 no indication that they were unhappy that this webui was gaining a lot of traction now again you
 could be saying well this is all strategic and so on i'm not sure never attribute to malice what you
 can attribute to incompetence but now we get to the last bit and that's the release of stable
 diffusion 1.5 stable diffusion is a model that has seen a number of updates in sort of recent weeks
 and stable diffusion 1.5 is the next iteration in that line now as you can see here it was released
 on the hogging face hub by not stability ai but by runway ml now stable diffusion even though
 stability ai sort of puts themselves behind it is actually a conglomeration by many people building
 on research that has been open sourced and published before all the code is sort of like a
 melting pot of different things that exist and then maybe some engineering tricks on top of that
 so with these open source things it's hard to say who actually owns what now apparently stability
 had wanted to hold back version 1.5 until they are ready to release it whereas runway ml which is a
 company that makes creative tools makes image editors and video editors that are based on ai
 has one been wanting to release this so they have released it and after they've released it stability
 ai has requested a takedown of this published model characterizing it as a leak of their ip
 ip being intellectual property not internet protocol in this case so to this takedown request
 runway ml had actually decided to officially communicate on this discussion thread saying
 chris here ceo and co-founder of runway since our founding in 2018 we've been on a mission to empower
 anyone to create the impossible we're excited to share this newest version of stable diffusion so
 that we can continue delivering our mission this version of stable diffusion is a continuation of
 the original high resolution image synthesis with latent diffusion models work that we created and
 published and now more commonly referred to as stable diffusion so stable diffusion comes from
 a line of published research and the researchers that had been working on this paper at least
 partially are now part of runway ml stable diffusion is an ai model developed by patrick
 esser from runway and robin rumbach from lmu munich the research and code behind stable diffusion was
 open sourced last year the model was released under the creative ml open rail m license we
 confirm there has been no breach of ip as flagged and we thank stability ai for the compute donation
 to retrain the original model so essentially this is like it's like also formulated a bit passive
 aggressively here but i think chris has every reason to do so essentially saying that nope all
 the code has existed we actually authored that code or part of us authored that code it's all open
 source it's all there the model that we've retrained is actually under an open source license so
 absolutely no claim to ip can be laid here to stability saying that they essentially just
 provided the compute to retrain the original model and simply providing the compute does not
 make them the owner of the ip now i am not a lawyer this is not legal advice i don't know what the
 exact legal situation is right here but it does make a lot of sense to me that they essentially
 say like wait you know all of this stuff is open source so we can retrain this stuff just as much
 as you can and it's not like they have retrained you know two things it's not like runway ml and
 stability have both worked on a version 1.5 or something it seems like stability was the
 compute giver to runway to actually develop the official 1.5 of stable diffusion and then as far
 as i can tell from the conversations and speculation around it again this is all speculation
 it was such that stability wanted to kind of hold back that release while runway wanted to
 release it and in the end i guess runway decided let's release it because you know legally there's
 nothing they can do side note see this edited four days ago a lot of these things are edited
 including like the official thing right here now this says edit right here but for the other ones
 like i don't like what's what are the edits i can't see like as much as it's cool to have public
 discussions on the hogging face hop like i really need to see how they edited stuff because you know
 otherwise how are you gonna know what happened like i'll just insert like some empty posts every
 now and then and then later i can go on and edit them to say anything i want well in any case
 there is a lot of discussion following right here however stability never officially said anything
 here in this open discussion however as julian says in the original post in the edit stability
 legal team reached out to hogging face reverting the initial takedown request therefore we close
 this thread so the model stays up and running under runway ml as stable diffusion version 1.5
 and again you can ask yourself big evil company that is trying to you know make money therefore
 keep the models to themselves not wanting someone else to release them maybe on the other hand was
 this kind of a rash decision to issue this takedown request when clearly i guess they didn't really
 have claims and even if it like makes them look really really really bad yes on on that too so
 again i don't really know i also don't exactly know what happened right here stability ai certainly
 has associated themselves heavily with the name stable diffusion but to what degree stable diffusion
 is actually a product of stability ai whether they have rights or not for giving compute how
 much they've actually worked on it all of this is quite in transparent on top of that a lot of this
 stuff if not all is actually open source the code is open source the data is open source the models
 that serve as checkpoints maybe are open source and therefore you can also ask yourselves well
 if i take stable diffusion 1.5 and to train it for a bit more can i just call it stable diffusion 1.6
 is there a trademark or something on it is this now a public word all of these questions are
 completely open as i can say in none of these situations stability ai has necessarily made the
 popular choice whether it's like an evil or a good choice that's you know a question that you might
 want to ask i lean towards it was more speed incompetence and pirate mentality that sort of
 made them screw up a couple of times rather than evilness however now comes the actual scary part
 so this is a post from daniel jeffries who is the cio of stable diffusion the post is called why the
 future of open source ai is so much bigger than stable diffusion 1.5 and why it matters to you
 this is a post in part justifying why they wanted to keep to hold back the release of stable diffusion
 1.5 daniel jeffries is as i said the cio and the post is very much written from the perspective of
 stability ai saying all of it all the time saying we you know we have taken a step back at stability
 ai so this is definitely speaking from the perspective of the company and not just a personal
 opinion now if you've watched my interview with a mod a mod had very much the attitude of yeah
 we'll just release the stuff you know if people want to do weird things with it then so be it
 right in fact the tool is only useful if you can do good and bad things with it and you know i think
 the last weeks have demonstrated clearly the benefits of releasing these things to the public
 clearly much more good has come out of this than bad has come out of it and the bad that would have
 been prevented by you know putting the model behind an api i'm not sure that that much bad has
 been prevented in any case guess why guess what the reasoning of daniel jeffries is why they wanted
 to hold back stable diffusion 1.5 we've heard from regulators and the general public that we need to
 focus more strongly on security to ensure that we're taking all the steps possible to make sure
 that people don't use stable diffusion for illegal purposes or hurting people yes hurting people it's
 like completely open ai again open ai starting out we want to be open we want to democratize we want
 to bring this to everyone and then they're like ah but we need to make sure it's safe like it can't
 be safe the definition of a useful tool means you can use it which means you can also use it for bad
 if you can use it for anything at all it's possible to be used for bad and it's the same mentality the
 mentality is we know what's good for you so we keep this to ourselves and once we have determined
 what's you know that it's appropriate then you plebs you can have it and we're going to form
 foundations to make it seem like we're a non-profit open ai is ruled by a non-profit i mean the company
 itself is limited profit and it's you know a hold held by a non-profit and we are going to form
 committees of experts and and you know everyone can take no like no it's the exact same thing again
 we know what's good for you we are the elite we know and you know you don't so we can't trust you
 to make these decisions because think of the children the blog post is also filled with
 statements such as we also won't stand by quietly when other groups leak the model in order to draw
 some quick press to themselves while trying to wash their hands of responsibility like tell me
 this doesn't sound exactly like open ai like or like the journalists that came after this model
 and sentences like we are committed to open source at our very core like no you're not you're you're
 not like if if you believe that you first do things and then only once you've determined it's
 it's good for the plebs then you release it you're not committed to open source at your very core
 you are not of the attitude that people should have access to the tools and should have self-determination
 of what to do with them because before long you will discover in fact that there's not possible
 to release a model that is safe enough the only possibility is in fact to put it behind an api
 and filter the queries and filter the outputs and don't let people put bad words into that thing
 and you know have terms of services that prohibit people from doing anything at all except building
 a rainbow world around the model where nothing bad ever happens and at that point it will become
 useless lastly again you have the choice of believing obviously stability it was just all
 the trick and they're exactly the same as open ai because clearly one of their senior officials
 says so the other possibility that i want to suggest to you is very much also the same as i
 said before this thing grew it grew very quickly and it is very well possible that emad had to
 hire a lot of people including this person who has a completely opposite opinion of anything that
 stability ai and open ai in its real sense stands for and has just kind of let these people run loose
 a little bit and all we can hope for is that either gets a better grip on these people or that the
 community steps up and essentially makes daniel jeffries and similar people have a change of
 hearts and if there is a third possibility and then that is that regulators are making so much
 pressure on these people that they're essentially forced into this track well in this case i can
 only hope that you know stability ai finds themselves in a situation where they don't comply
 where they say no we are going to release stuff and we're not just going to lay down flat when
 the european union or california comes in and enacts regulation just because people can do
 bad stuff with things we'll find a different way of distributing these things we'll find a different
 way of getting people access and we are not going to just stop innovating and stop releasing and we
 are not going to centralize power and putting everything behind an api until it's squeaky clean
 or no longer useful remember what open ai said about gpt2 not three gpt2 they delayed the release
 of the model due to its potential of abuse now we look back now and we know that this is completely
 bogus in no there is no way gpt2 has any serious potential for abuse and in fact no one has abused
 it there has been not really any significant demonstration of its abuse now you can say good
 fear open ai didn't know at the moment but also that was the point of gpt2 was the point in time
 where the strategy was invented of claiming that due to security concerns we're not going to release
 this to the public we're going to keep this for ourselves until we tested it and now gpt2 can be
 found on the hugging face hub but after a couple of years after all of this i don't know what the
 conclusion is i don't know what to tell you what i can say is that i really really hope that stability
 will get back on track and regain its commitment and its outlook on being open being community
 driven being decentralized and you know releasing their stuff now i'm not saying they have any
 obligation to do so they're a company they're absolutely entitled to just say nope actually
 we want to make money and we build our closed source models like that's fine but it's just not
 in compliance with what they claim to be and i very much hope that there is someone on this planet
 that is like they claim to be open decentralized and sharing whatever happens we'll keep a very
 close eye on this and i'll see you next time bye bye you