Startup Unstable Diffusion raised more than $56,000 with 867 backers to train porn-generating artificial intelligence. But suddenly Kickstarter changed its mind about what AI-based projects could be allowed on the platform and shut down the Unstable Diffusion campaign. Since Kickstarter uses an all-or-nothing model and the campaign is not yet complete, all money raised will be returned to backers.

“Over the past few days, we’ve reached out to our community advisory board and read your feedback from our team and from social media,” CEO Everett Taylor said in a blog post. — “One thing is clear: Kickstarter should and will always be on the side of creative work and the people behind this work. We’re here to help creative work flourish.”

Kickstarter’s new approach to pitching AI projects will be intentionally vague:

“This technology is really new and we don’t have all the answers,” Taylor wrote. “The decisions we make now may be different from the ones we make in the future, so we want this to be an ongoing conversation with all of you.”

The platform is now looking into how designs interact with copyrighted material, particularly when artists’ work appears in the algorithm’s training data without consent. Kickstarter also plans to determine whether a project will “exploit a particular community or put anyone at risk of harm.”

Tame Power BI and predict the future of your company.

REGISTER!

In recent months, tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion have had massive success, bringing conversations about the ethics of AI artwork to the forefront of public debate.

Some artists took to Kickstarter via Twitter to force the platform to abandon the Unstable Diffusion project, claiming that AI art generators could threaten artists’ careers. The community was alarmed by Unstable Diffusion’s promotional text:

“With $25,000 in funding, we can afford to train a new model [ИИ] using 75 million high-quality images, including ~25 million anime and cosplay images, ~25 million art images from Artstation, DeviantArt, and Behance, and ~25 million photos.”

Many artists post their work on these sites without giving express consent to such use of their work. But despite shutting down on Kickstarter, Unstable Diffusion continues to raise funds elsewhere.

“While Kickstarter’s capitulation to a vociferous group of artists disappoints us, we and our supporters will not back down from defending creative freedom,” said Unstable Diffusion CEO Armaan Chaudhry. “We’ve revamped our site so our supporters can directly participate in the creation and release of new artistic AI systems that are more powerful than ever. We are responding to the call to defend ourselves against artists who are advocating to make all AI art illegal, the support of funders will allow us to challenge this increasingly well-funded and organized lobby.”

Unstable Diffusion now processes donations directly on their website using Stripe. So far, over $15,000 has been raised.

In a longer message posted to the Unstable Diffusion Discord community, which has more than 97,000 members, Chaudhry warned members about the anti-II artist movement:

“It appears that the anti-AI crowd is trying to silence us and destroy our community by sending false reports to Kickstarter, Patreon, and Discord. They’ve even started a GoFundMe campaign, raising over $150,000, to lobby to make AI art illegal.”

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen other communities and businesses cower in the face of these attacks. Zeipher has announced discontinuation and closed its community, and Stability AI is now removing artists from Stable Diffusion 3.0. But we will not be silent. We will not allow them to succeed in their attempts to stifle our creativity and innovation. Our community is strong (almost 100,000 users) and we will not lose to a small group of people who are too afraid to use new tools and technologies.”

Stable Diffusion uses a dataset of 2.3 billion images to train its text-to-image generator. But only about 2.9% of the dataset contains NSFW material, giving the model little leverage when it comes to specific content. This is where Unstable Diffusion comes in. The project, which is part of Equilibrium AI, uses volunteers from its Discord server to gather data to develop fine-tuned AI.

In its now-suspended Kickstarter crowdfunding, Unstable Diffusion said it will work on an AI art model that can “better handle human anatomy, generate in diverse and controlled art styles, more fairly represent understudied areas of content generation such as LGBTQ, race, gender.” .

Furthermore, there is no objective and accurate way to verify whether the majority of conventional pornographic content freely available on the Internet has been consensually created. Also, even if a model agrees to appear in porn, that doesn’t mean automatic consent to use her images for AI training. While this technology can create incredibly realistic views, it also means it can be used as a weapon to create deepfake porn without consent.

A painting created by Midjourney’s artificial intelligence has won a competition in the US – artists are furious

Source: TechCrunch