So I'm interpreting this that it won't ever get released.
Nowadays we just get blog posts about results that were supposedly achieved, an accompanying paper that can’t be reproduced (because of Google’s magical “private datasets”), and some screencaps of a cool application of the tech that is virtually guaranteed to never make it to product.
The calculus is different now.
Everyone needs to do this and probably is already doing this. Search for "ChatGPT lobotomized" and you'll see plenty of complaints about the safety filters added by OpenAI.
Remember the Google assistant demo, where it booked a table at a restaurant?
That never materialized. Google assistant is just eating crayons today.
1. they made a lot of careful tweaks to the unet network architecture - it seems like they ran many different ablations here ("In total, our endeavor consumes approximately 512 TPUs spanning 30 days").
2. the model distillation is based on previous UFOGen work from the same team https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09257 (hence the UFO graphic in the diffusion-gan diagram)
3. they train their own 8-channel latent encoder / decoder ("VAE") from scratch (similar to Meta's Emu paper) instead of using the SD VAEs like many other papers do
4. they use an internal dataset of 150m image/text pairs (roughly the size of laion-highres)
5. they also reran SD training from scratch on this dataset to get their baseline performance
But to your point its not as impressive as it was sold: glorified reverse phone tree. But it is what it was sold as, and it is available.
"Google Assistant just made a dinner reservation for me... I knew this was coming... but mind blown!" https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/ezv3us/google_a...
"Now, you can use it on all Pixel phones in 43 U.S. states.
All it takes is a few seconds to tell your Assistant where you'd like to go. Just ask the Assistant on your phone, “Book a table for four people at [restaurant name] tomorrow night.” The Assistant will then call the restaurant to see if it can accommodate your request. Once your reservation is successfully made, you’ll receive a notification on your phone, an email update and a calendar invite so you don’t forget."
https://blog.google/products/assistant/book-table-google-ass...
Additionally, in airplane mode it heavily doesn't want to translate, in my use case I have to go to saved translations as otherwise it won't even let me type what I need to translate.
https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/ezv3us/google_a...
Or the comments under https://youtu.be/-RHG5DFAjp8
It's probably hard to trigger these days because most places support OpenTable or similar.
I don’t see it as a disadvantage, since Google markets services on both devices you mentioned. Hardly anyone will abandon its iPhone in favor of a Pixel just for a Google service.
So I think it’s ok what Google did marketing wise.
2022-05 - google imagen research paper posted >>31484562
2022-12 - imagen developers leave google to form ideogram
2023-08 - ideogram ships a version of imagen, free, for anyone who wants to use it https://ideogram.ai/publicly-available
2023-12 - google "imagen 2" is officially "generally available for Vertex AI customers on the allowlist (i.e., approved for access)." >>38628417
It doesn't seem to do it "live" in the preview without network access, though.
And the translation app seemed to get into a bad state and fail to download the language packs without first clearing the data, saying I need to download the pack, but the language list showing it already was. Though I haven't even opened it since I transferred it from my old phone, so if there's some phone-specific stuff going on that might have got messed up.
We did that despite some moral ambivalence/uneasiness around AI "art".
For example, give me a "young and exciting Dana Meadows in front of a board of systems theory"
I'm not awful at photoshopping things, and sometimes that's the only way to get a specific image one has in mind. But it saves time and lets us concentrate on writing and researching instead.
TBH if an artist/illustrator came along and said "Let me do the episode icons even though you can't pay me yet" I'd feel inclined to ask the AI to step aside.
This will never see the light of day.
OpenAi gets a lot of criticism for being closed, but at least I can play with their api most of the time.
What's the point of this if we will never be able to use this?
The voice recorder transcription is also on device, but I haven't gotten it to work without google play services on GrapheneOS
AI researchers can make any claim, the risk of getting busted is close to none.
Didn't work ? Well dataset was different
Didn't work ? Well code was different
Can I try your work ? Well it's proprietary / I don't have access / We shutdowned the cluster
But the result is guaranteed increase in salary and job opportunities.
Since these companies are publicly listed, they are by definition encouraged and encouraging to make grandiose claims in order to make themselves more attractive to investors, and they can blame the individuals if it becomes discovered.
My favorite being that Bard (PaLM version) is sentient, but it was too big this time.
Imagine a large pharmaceutical company claiming they can cure very important diseases, but the results cannot be independently verified, nor audited.
It’s ok in the short-term, but not when you make that claim during few years.
Photoshop has the power to cause distress too when used maliciously.
You go after the aggressors, not the tool used for aggression.
I agree that we should legislate against the aggressors, that's why I'm pointing out the limitations of technical solutions like watermarks. We need extensions to things like revenge pornography laws, if we're talking about legislation, and I don't see any harm in outlawing services that automate the creation of deepfakes.
Of course the only "solution" is that we would universally behind to teach young boys that they are not entitled to women's bodies or their sexuality, but so many grown men apparently disagree that I can't see it happening quickly enough.
That said, I agree that I wish there were more done post-research towards products with some of this stuff.
It's a nice applause line though.
They've been around for 30 years, deepfakes as they are today have been around for less than a year. I'm not sure absolute numbers are the best thing to look at either way.
Edit: you disagree that men aren't entitled to women's sexuality?
Edit: I mis-interpreted what was being disagree with.
This article talks a bit about the lack of legal power to fight against deepfakes: https://mcolaw.com/theres-not-much-we-can-legally-do-about-d...
Google AI internally needs a huge culture change, stop acting like academics making things for academics and start working like developers making products for customers.
I'd say in 10 years we'll be looking back and seeing the wasted potential but actually you can look back around 10 years and already see the wasted potential of all the things Google demoed or papered and never shipped.
I think the central issue here is: what restrictions, if any, should be placed around creating and distributing a likeness of another person? Are we just looking to prohibit pornographic likenesses, or do you think the restrictions should be broader? What's the threshold rule you would apply? Should these rules be medium-specific, or should we also prohibit people from, say, painting a likeness of another person without their consent?
I guess in a US context you'd also have to consider whether it's constitutional to restrict freedom of expression, even the distasteful ones, in this manner.
Edit: Just saw your edit suggesting that I think "men are entitled to women's bodies" (whatever that means). I think I'll end my participation here, not interested in having a bad faith discussion.
Personally the limits are similar to that, as I'm personally most interested in fighting sexual harassment. The legislation against revenge pornography already faces and tackles issues of what constitutes pornography and when it becomes illegal to disseminate pornographic images of others, so it's not an intractable problem.
Indeed, we also have precedents for limiting the use of tools for certain purposes. Using deepfake technology to generate images akin to CSAM would already be illegal in the UK, but other broader and everyday examples exist like speed limits for cars.
Edit to respond to yours: I said above that we should teach boys they're not entitled to women's sexuality, but that many men disagree. You said you were one of them. I had meant the disagreement being on the entitlement, but I'm now considering that you took it to mean they disagreed with the education about entitlement. It was a misunderstanding, and I was responding in good faith. I didn't suggest anything about you, I asked if my interpretation of your response was correct.
The precedents you raise are worth considering. They're related but not completely analogous to deepfake porn of real people in my view. CSAM is criminalised due to the direct harm its production inflicts on minors and the deep injury to society that follows. Deepfake CSAM, I presume, has more of an 'obscenity' rationale as there is no actual direct harm inflicted on minors in that case. I suppose you could have a similar obscenity rationale for criminalising deepfake porn but you would then have to accept that pornography in general should be outlawed. An obscenity rationale would also be more supportive of criminal sanctions, as acts of obscenity injure society in addition to individual subjects.
I think revenge pornography is the best analogy here. I assume the policy rationale / theory of harm for criminalising 'revenge porn' (i.e. distributing true intimate private images of another person) is one of two things: (1) violation of the subject's privacy or (2) infliction of psychological harm on the subject. If the policy rationale is (1) then I don't I don't think there's a sound analogy to deepfake porn - deepfakes are fictional and so do not violate the privacy of the subject.
If the rationale is (2), psychological harm, then I could see a similar policy rationale for legislating against deepfake porn. But if psychological harm is your policy rationale then wouldn't it make more sense to directly criminalise the infliction of psychological harm on others regardless of the method used? If we were regulating on a principled and universal basis we should pass a law that criminalises any act, publication or utterance that inflicts psychological harm on another person, rather than using the law to solve single instances of this class of offences. Although I'd strongly disagree with such a law due to the chilling effect it would have on all forms of speech, expression and public commentary I think there's at least a principled argument to be had.
But if you legislate on this principle then you have to grapple with the far reaching implications of such a law - if someone writes some smutty (but fictional) erotic story about me that I find psychologically distressing should they then be thrown in jail? What if they say hurtful things to me that I find psychologically harmful? What if they insult a religion or political candidate, party or ideology that I strongly identify with? We all inflict psychological harm on others from time to time - what should minimum harm threshold be?
Personally, I don't think the criminal law is the answer in either the deepfake or revenge porn cases if the rationale is 'psychological harm'. Although I'm not sure where I stand on the following, I think a civil tort for infliction of psychological harm would be the sanest option if we feel the need to regulate against infliction of psychological harm. It would be analogous to defamation and libel torts, but instead of having to prove economic harm the plaintiff would have to prove some minimum threshold level of psychological harm to become entitled to compensation from the defendant in proportion to the actual provable injury sustained.
My thoughts aside, what is your general theory of harm / principled policy rationale here and, on that basis, what do you think the state's response should be to regulate?
Stop larping as an academic and actually start working as an employee, you know what they actually are.