Adam's Blogroll: click through to the author's blog
Perhaps to no one’s surprise, generative artificial intelligence models contain bias rooted in the data that drive them and by the people who design the systems. For Bloomberg, Leonardo Nicoletti and Dina Bass examined the extent to which the bias exists through the lens of Stable Diffusion.
Most of the piece is a rundown of what Stable Diffusion shows, but the biggest tell is the chart that compares the generated images against reality.
Tags: AI, bias, Bloomberg, Stable Diffusion
Posted by in AI, Bias, Bloomberg, Infographics, Stable Diffusion
AI-based image generation take bits and pieces from existing people-made images and tries to smartly mash sources together for something new. However, that something new often looks a lot like someone else’s work. It’s why Getty Images is suing Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion.
Stable Attribution goes in the opposite direction of image generation, and instead tries to identify source images of a given AI-generated image. Load an image and Stable Attribution looks for the most similar images in the Stable Diffusion training data.
The explainer on the Stable Attribution homepage is a nice abstraction of how the process works.
Tags: AI, attribution, ethics, Stable Diffusion
Posted by in AI, attribution, Ethics, Stable Diffusion, statistics
Lensa is an app that lets you retouch photos, and it recently added a feature that uses Stable Diffusion to generate AI-assisted portraits. While fun for some, the feature reveals biases in the underlying dataset. Melissa Heikkilä, for MIT Technology Review, describes problematic biases towards sexualized images for some groups:
Lensa generates its avatars using Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI model that generates images based on text prompts. Stable Diffusion is built using LAION-5B, a massive open-source data set that has been compiled by scraping images off the internet.
And because the internet is overflowing with images of naked or barely dressed women, and pictures reflecting sexist, racist stereotypes, the data set is also skewed toward these kinds of images.
This leads to AI models that sexualize women regardless of whether they want to be depicted that way, Caliskan says—especially women with identities that have been historically disadvantaged.
Tags: AI, bias, images, Lensa, MIT Technology Review, Stable Diffusion
Posted by in AI, Bias, Images, Lensa, Mistaken Data, MIT Technology Review, Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion is an AI model that lets you enter text to generate images. Spectrograms visually represent sound. Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros combined the two for Riffusion, which lets you enter text and the model generates a spectrogram that is converted to audio.
Read more about the process here.
Tags: AI, music, spectrogram, Stable Diffusion
Posted by in AI, Music, spectrogram, Stable Diffusion, statistics
AI-based image generation is having a moment. Time some text and you can get a piece of art that resembles the style of your favorite artist. However, there’s an ethical dilemma with the source material. Andy Baio talked to Hollie Mengert, whose artwork was used to create a model for Stable Diffusion:
“For me, personally, it feels like someone’s taking work that I’ve done, you know, things that I’ve learned — I’ve been a working artist since I graduated art school in 2011 — and is using it to create art that that I didn’t consent to and didn’t give permission for,” she said. “I think the biggest thing for me is just that my name is attached to it. Because it’s one thing to be like, this is a stylized image creator. Then if people make something weird with it, something that doesn’t look like me, then I have some distance from it. But to have my name on it is ultimately very uncomfortable and invasive for me.”
AI-generated charts are only tangentially a thing so far. We humans still have a leg up in the context and meaning part of understanding data.
Tags: AI, Andy Baio, art, ethics, Hollie Mengert, Stable Diffusion
Posted by in AI, Andy Baio, art, Ethics, Hollie Mengert, Stable Diffusion, statistics
People have been having fun with the text-to-image generators lately. Enter a description, and the AI churns out believable and sometimes detailed images that match the input. The reason these systems work is because the models were trained on a lot of data, in the form of images. Andy Baio and Simon Willison made a tool to browse a subset of this data behind the recently released Stable Diffusion.
Tags: AI, Andy Baio, Simon Willison, Stable Diffusion
Posted by in AI, Andy Baio, Data Sharing, Simon Willison, Stable Diffusion