On Monday, a technology start-up in London did something that most software companies never do: It published the code behind its creation so that anyone could replicate it. Any developer in the world can rebuild the image-generating model made by Stability AI, which can spit out any picture or photograph you can imagine from a single text prompt. The tool is almost magical — creepy, even — in what it can do. Want an image of a short-haired English blue cat playing guitar?
However, here is how this tool is potentially groundbreaking compared with DALL-E 2, a similar program that San Francisco-based OpenAI launched earlier this year, which hundreds of people have used to make wacky art.
Stability AI’s is free to replicate and has very few restrictions. DALL-E 2’s code has not been released, and it will not generate images of specific individuals or politically sensitive topics such as Ukraine, to prevent the software from being misused. By contrast, the London tool is a veritable free-for-all.
Illustration: June Hsu
Stability AI’s tool offers huge potential for creating fake images of real people. I used it to conjure several “photos” of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson dancing awkwardly with a young woman, actor Tom Cruise walking through the rubble of war-torn Ukraine, a realistic-looking portrait of actress Gal Gadot and an alarming image of London’s Palace of Westminster on fire.
Most of the images of Johnson and Cruise looked fake, but some looked like they could pass muster with the more gullible among us.
Stability AI on Monday said that its model includes a “safety classifier,” which blocks scenes of a sexual nature, but can also be adjusted or removed entirely as the user sees fit.
Stability AI founder and chief executive officer Emad Mostaque says he was more worried about public access to artificial intelligence (AI) than the harm his software could cause.
“I believe control of these models should not be determined by a bunch of self-appointed people in Palo Alto,” he told me in an interview in London last week, referring to the economic hub in California’s Silicon Valley. “I believe they should be open.”
His company would make money by charging for special access to the system, as well as from selling licenses to generate famous characters, he said.
Mostaque’s release is part of a broader push to make AI more freely available, reasoning that it should not be controlled by a handful of technology firms.
It is a noble sentiment, but one that also comes with risks.
For instance, while Adobe Photoshop might be better at faking an embarrassing photo of a politician, Stability AI’s tool requires much less skill to use and is free. Anyone with a keyboard can hit its refresh button over and over until the system, known as Stable Diffusion, spits out something that looks convincing.
Moreover, Stable Diffusion’s images will look more accurate over time as the model is rebuilt and retrained on new sets of data. (1)
Mostaque’s answer to objections to the release is that we are, depressingly, in the midst of an inevitable rise in fake images anyway, and our sensibilities would simply have to adjust.
“People will be aware of the fact that anyone can create that image on their phone, in one second... People will be like: ‘Oh it’s probably just created,’” he said.
In other words, people would learn to trust the Internet even less than they already do, and the phrase “pics or it didn’t happen” would evolve into “pics don’t prove anything anymore.”
Even so, Mostaque anticipates that 99 percent of people who use his tool will have good intentions.
Now that his model has been released, social media firms such as Snap Inc and Byte Dance Inc’s TikTok could replicate it for their own platforms.
TikTok, for instance, in May added an AI tool for generating background pictures, but it is highly stylized and does not produce specific images of people or objects. That could change if TikTok decides to use the new model.
Mostaque, a former hedge fund manager who studied computer science at the University of Oxford, said that developers in Russia had already replicated it.
Mostaque’s open-source approach runs counter to how most major tech companies have handled AI discoveries, driven as much by intellectual property concerns as public safety.
Google has a model called Imagen whose creations look even more realistic than DALL-E 2, but the company said it would not release it because of the “potential risks of misuse.”
It said it is “exploring a framework” for a potential future release, which might include some oversight.
OpenAI also said it would not release details about DALL-E 2 or other tools it developed for anyone to copy. (2)
Monopolistic technology companies should not be the sole gatekeepers of powerful AI because they are bound to steer it toward their own agenda, whether that is in advertising or keeping people hooked on an endless scroll.
However, I am also uneasy about the idea of “democratizing AI.” Mostaque himself has used this phrase, an increasingly popular one in tech. (3)
Making a product affordable or even freely available does not really fit the definition. At its heart, democracy relies on governance to work properly, and there is little evidence of oversight for tools such as Stable Diffusion.
Mostaque said that he relied on a community of several thousand developers and supporters, who deliberated on the chat forum Discord about when it would be safe to release his tool. So that is something.
However, now that Stable Diffusion is out, its use will be largely unpoliced.
You could argue that putting powerful AI tools into the wild will contribute to human progress in some way and that Stable Diffusion will transform creativity as Mostaque predicts, but we should expect unintended and unforeseen consequences that are just as pervasive as the benefits of making anyone an AI artist, whether that be a new generation of misinformation campaigns or new types of online scams, or something else entirely.
Mostaque will not be the last person to release a powerful AI tool to the world and, if Stability AI had not done it, someone else would have. That race to be the first to bring powerful innovation to the masses is partly what is driving this gray area of software development.
When I pointed out the irony of his company name given the disruption it will likely cause, he countered that “the instability and chaos was coming anyway.”
The world should brace for an increasingly bumpy ride.
(1) Releasing the system’s “weights” means that anyone could fine tune the calibration to make it more accurate in certain areas. For instance, someone with a large cache of images of former US president Donald Trump could retrain the model to conjure much more accurate “photos” of him, or anyone else.
(2) OpenAI started in 2015 as a nonprofit organization whose goal was to democratize AI, but running AI systems requires powerful computers that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. To solve that, OpenAI in 2019 took a US$1 billion investment from Microsoft, in return for giving the tech giant first rights to commercialize any of its discoveries. OpenAI has since released increasingly fewer details about new models, such as DALL-E 2, often to the consternation of some computer scientists.
(3) Among the many examples of the trope, Robinhood Markets wants to “democratize finance,” and it has created an app for trading stocks and cryptoassets, while the controversial start-up Clearview AI wants to “democratize facial recognition.”
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. She previously worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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