Comment by Filligree

3 years ago

Who pays to use generators? The open ones are way more capable and interesting, generally.

Isn't high-quality open image generation almost entirely dependent on Stability releasing their foundational models for free, at great expense to them?

That's not something you'll be able to rely on long-term, there won't always be a firehose of venture capital money to subsidise that kind of charity.

  • The cost of training them is going down, though. Given the existence of models like Pixart, I don’t think we’ll stay dependent on corporate charity for long.

Is that really your concern?

Whether you pay for it?

Let’s put it this way: paying for or not paying for stolen goods. Does it make any difference?

Why is that remotely relevant?

You want to argue “are the good stolen?” Sure. That’s a discussion we can have.

Did you pay for them or not? Who cares?

  • That's a terrible analogy. Until the scrapers start deleting all other copies of what what they're scraping, "stealing" the art in a traditional sense, there's no harm done in the process of training the network. Any harm done comes after that.