Linked List: September 6, 2022

Tuesday, 6 September 2022

‘4.2 Gigabytes, Or: How to Draw Anything’ ★: Andy Salerno:

Yes, I’m waxing poetic here. No, I am not heralding the arrival of AGI, or our AI overlords. I am simply admiring the beauty of it, while it is fresh and new.

Because it won’t be fresh and new for long. This thing I’m feeling is not much different from how I felt using email for the first time - “Grandma got my message already? In Florida? In seconds?” It was the nearest thing to magic my child-self had ever seen. Now email is the most boring and mundane part of my day.

There is already much talk about practical uses. Malicious uses. Downplaying. Up playing. Biases. Monetization. Democratization - which is really just monetization with a more marketable name.

I’m not trying to get into any of that here. I’m just thinking about those 4.2 gigabytes. How small it seems, in today’s terms. Such a little bundle that holds so much.
Exploring 12 Million of the 2.3 Billion Images Used to Train Stable Diffusion’s Image Generator ★: Andy Baio:

One of the biggest frustrations of text-to-image generation AI models is that they feel like a black box. We know they were trained on images pulled from the web, but which ones? As an artist or photographer, an obvious question is whether your work was used to train the AI model, but this is surprisingly hard to answer. [...]

So, with the help of my friend Simon Willison, we grabbed the data for over 12 million images used to train Stable Diffusion, and used his Datasette project to make a data browser for you to explore and search it yourself. Note that this is only a small subset of the total training data: about 2% of the 600 million images used to train the most recent three checkpoints, and only 0.5% of the 2.3 billion images that it was first trained on.
Jonathan Pie on Liz Truss, Britain’s New Prime Minister ★: The New York Times:

Caught in a swirl of crises and feeling abandoned by their government, Britons are angry.

To capture this, we turned once again to the fictional broadcast journalist Jonathan Pie, performed by Tom Walker. In the satirical Opinion video above, he takes viewers on a tour of a broken Britain and argues that Ms. Truss is not well equipped to fix it.