This is a linkpost for https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-public-release
Not the OP and I'm biased because I created an AI assistant for human-in-the-loop melody generation, but won't non-pro art consumers be happy with more pretty images around them? The cost of the creation of art will go down, so this will allow indie game creators and others to focus on the story or other elements they're good at and still create something appealing. For example, you will be able to recreate your dreams and show them to others. Or create a holodeck-style environment in VR or AR by describing it.
I was thinking more utilons/QALYs. The word "society" admittedly suggests something else, since empirically high-utility outcomes can appear asocial (e.g. staying home and reading a book).
Positive:
People will pay way less for new pretty images than they did before.
Thanks to img2img people that couldn't draw well before now finally can: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wvcyih/definitely_my_favourite_generation_so_far/
Because of this, a lot more art will be produced, and I can't wait to see it.
Since good drawings are now practically free, we will see them in places where we couldn't before, like in fanfiction.
Stable Diffusion isn't quite as good as a talented artist, but since we can request hundreds of variations and pick the best, the quality of art might increase.
Ambiguous or neutral:
It can produce realistic images and it is easier to use and more powerful than Photoshop, so we will see a lot of misinformation online. But once most people realize how easy it is to fabricate false photographs hopefully it will lead them to trust what they see online way less than they did before, and closer to the appropriate level.
Anyone will be able to make porn of anyone else. As long as people don't do anything stupid after seeing the images, this seems inconsequential. As discussed on HN, it might cause people to stop worrying about others seeing them naked, even if the photos are real.
Anyway, both of these will cause a lot of drama, which I at least, perhaps selfishly, consider to be slightly positive.
Negative:
I expect a lot of people will lose their jobs. Most companies will prefer to reduce their costs and hire a few non-artists to make art rather than making more art.
New kinds of scams will become possible and some people will keep believing everything they see online.
Unlike DALL-E 2, anyone can access this, so it will be much more popular and will make many people realize how advanced current AI is and how consequential it will be, which will probably lead to more funding.
It seems almost certain that it will lead to an increase in AI funding. It also seems almost certain to lead to an increase in unfunded AI work, that will increase the number of people with AI development skills and reduce the cost of recruiting engineers for funded AI work.
That was astonishingly easy to get working, and now on my laptop 3060 I can write a new prompt and generate another 10-odd samples every few minutes. Of course, I do mean 10 odd samples: most of the human images it's giving me have six fingers on one hand and/or a vaguely fetal-alcohol-syndrome vibe about the face, and none of them could be mistaken for a photo or even art by a competent artist yet. But they're already better than any art I could make, and I've barely begun to experiment with "prompt engineering"; maybe I should have done that on easier subjects before jumping into the uncanny valley of realistic human images headfirst.
Only optimizedSD/optimized_txt2img.py works for me so far, though. scripts/txt2img.py, as well as any version of img2img.py, dies on my 6GB card with RuntimeError: CUDA out of memory.
Update: in the optimization fork at https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion , optimized_txt2img.py works on my GPU as well.
It's an open-source text-to-image model capable of producing NSFW content. I, for one, I'm very excited to see the consequences this has on society, which I expect to be mostly positive (except if it leads to an increase in AI funding). Any thoughts?
Other relevant links:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wqaizj/list_of_stable_diffusion_systems/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32555028
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DhDAXQw4PsWXnmwPS/ai-art-isn-t-about-to-shake-things-up-it-s-already-here