This week on The Changelog we’re talking about Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and the impact of AI generated art. We invited our good friend Simon Willison on the show today because he wrote a very thorough blog post titled, “Stable Diffusion is a really big deal.”

You may know Simon from his extensive contributions to open source software. Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web framework (which we don’t talk about at all on this show), he’s the creator of Datasette, a multi-tool for exploring and publishing data (which we do talk about on this show)…most of all Simon is a very insightful thinker, which he puts on display here on this episode. We talk from all the angles of this topic, the technical, the innovation, the future and possibilities, the ethical and the moral – we get into it all. The question is, will this era be known as the initial push back to the machine?

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Featuring:

• Simon Willison – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• Simon Willison on Wikipedia
• Stable Diffusion is a really big deal
• Exploring 12 Million of the 2.3 Billion Images Used to Train Stable Diffusion’s Image Generator
• Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion
• Stability.ai
• Greg Rutkowsk on ArtStation and on Twitter
• Stable Diffusion Launch Announcement
• Stable Diffusion Public Release
• The full text of the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license
• Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3
• Twitter thread about the ethics of the Stable Diffusion release from Joshua Achiam who works on AI safety at OpenAI
• Lexica.art - that really good search engine for 10m+ Stable Diffusion images and prompts
• Simon’s Twitter thread about Stable Diffusion - I keep on adding new things to this as they happen, the thread has been running for a few weeks now
• 4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything - a great post that talks through the process involved in getting good results out of Stable Diffusion using image2image and multiple round-trips through the model
• This tweet from Simon has a animated GIF of the Stable Diffusion Discord scrolling by during the 1.5 model preview
• inversion.github.io/">Textual Inversion also see this thread on Twitter
• This tweet talks about the Stable Diffusion concepts library, using Textual Inversion
• This tweet has great examples of Textual Inversion in action
• Simon’s Datasette Cloud preview - Check it out and signup
• Compressing images with Stable Diffusion
• “neuromancer” on Lexica
• Online Art Communities Begin Banning AI-Generated Images
• The Changelog #296: Burnout, open source, Datasette

Something missing or broken? interviews-506.md">PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:01) - This week on The Changelog(01:17) - Sponsor: Fly.io(03:41) - Welcome Simon(09:01) - Stability.ai seem to be long-game players(10:24) - Long on humanity vs short on individuals(11:55) - The results are impressive(13:31) - Opening conversation on ethics(14:48) - Simon explains Midjourney(17:56) - It's called Promt Engineering(20:58) - Now everyone knows who Greg Rutkowski is(23:20) - This AI can do what a human is capable of(27:27) - You've got good Prompt-ability(30:22) - The many many bag things you can do with this(32:06) - Sponsor: FireHydrant(33:49) - The genie is out of the bottle(35:10) - Was OpenAI's plan better?(36:33) - An AI future is inevitable(39:03) - Nothing beats an original Greg Rutkowski(40:57) - AI might force us all up the value chain(48:59) - Sponsor: Square(50:09) - Sponsor: Honeycomb(51:47) - Image-to-image(54:02) - These tools give artists superpowers(55:39) - Compression and abstraction(57:58) - This broke the internet(1:03:07) - Will this eat its own head?(1:04:01) - What's next in the path of AI?(1:08:53) - Eventually the computers are going to prompt us(1:12:25) - It's getting weird out there(1:14:11) - Closing out the show(1:15:19) - Outro