29 replies
23h22m
Looks like I still need a discord or a google account and can't just use regular email?
26 replies
22h3m
Ideogram 2.0 was also released today, and it's nerfed (anatomy is lot worse than 1.0 now) just like StableDiffusion versions after 1.5 which is very disappointing.
Well good thing we have Flux out in the open now, both midjourney releasing web version or ideogram releasing there 2.0 on the same day after 2 weeks of flux won't redeem them as much. Flux Dev is amazing, check what SD community is doing with it on https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/ . It can do fine tuning, there are Loras now, even control net. It can gen casual photos like no other tool out there, you won't be able to tell they are AI without looking way too deep.
15 replies
22h1m
Are there any publicly accessible Flux image generation services you may recommend to check out?
8 replies
20h27m
If you have a suitably powerful M-Mac or iOS device, you can run it locally using "Draw Things", which is free.
6 replies
19h56m
Just to clarify for other readers, Draw Things has support and provides download links to quants but no iOS device can run the full precision model which means you will get slightly different and usually lower quality output than stuff you may see elsewhere, even if you use the same settings. It's still damn impressive though.
5 replies
18h42m
Quality issue should be mainly due to using FP16 accmulators for GEMM in M1-M2, A14-A16 devices (it is not a problem for SD v1 / SDXL models due to smaller channel count). This is changed to FP32 accmulators for GEMM in these devices with 1.20240820.1 release. q8p should have comparable quality to non-quantized models (in Draw Things, it is called FLUX.1 [dev] (Exact)).
3 replies
13h9m
Claims that quantization doesn’t hurt models are made all the time but rely on the fact that almost all evaluations today of LLMs hardly scratch their surface. If we evaluated LLMs properly, even large quants would be detectably worse, and by a significant amount.
1 replies
2h30m
A model trained on BF16 that within the range of FP16 have effective bit rate of 13-bit at max (e5m7). Reasonable quantization (at 8-bit) gets you weight error (i.e. L2 distance on weights) down to < 1e-3, and full diffusion run (30 steps) have result with L2 distance (comparing to unquantized) < 5e-2.
I think there is a line somewhere between 4-bit to 8-bit that will hurt performance (for both diffusion models and LLM). But I doubt the line is between 8-bit to 13-bit.
(Another case in point: you can use generic lossless compression to get model weights from 13bit down to 11bit by just zip exponent and mantissa separately, that suggests the effective bit rate is lower than 13bit on full-precision model).
0 replies
2h21m
I buy these kinds of arguments but the moment a company or NeurIPS researcher claims even a "tiny" bit of loss happens, I become suspicious. I don't buy most claims of "we get 99%+ of the performance" made in practice.
But yes, I do believe that we will find proper lossless quants, and eventually (for real this time) get "only a little bit of loss" quants, but I don't think that the current 8 bits are there yet.
Also, quantized models often have worse GPU utilization which harms tokens/s if you have the hardware capable to run the unquantized types. It seems to depend on the quant. SD models seem to get faster when quantized, but LLMs are often slower. Very weird.
0 replies
12h16m
Not saying I disagree with you. But you don't present any evaluation results for your claim either.
0 replies
17h3m
Hey the creator! Thanks for all your hard work. Put in a tip feature so I can give you money.
0 replies
20h15m
Whoa, thanks for the tip!
0 replies
20h32m
90%+ of Flux image generations will be done through Grok.
0 replies
21h48m
Huggingface has quite a few spaces with the base dev model as well as different variations of it.
0 replies
21h57m
There are a few.
https://fastflux.ai/ for instant image gen using Schnell (but its fixed on 4 steps and is mainly a tech show off of inference engine by runware.ai)
https://www.segmind.com/ has API support with lots of options, I am using it to generate and set wallpaper using an AHK script. It's very very slow though.
https://replicate.com/black-forest-labs/flux-schnell/example...
https://huggingface.co/spaces/black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-schne...
https://getimg.ai/text-to-image
There are other tools now if you Google 'Flux image generator online'
0 replies
5h34m
We're one of the Black Forest Labs partners, you can try the models here: https://www.mystic.ai/black-forest-labs
0 replies
20h45m
Check out https://www.freepik.com/pikaso you can try flux and flux realism
0 replies
20h0m
Twitter's image generator is the pro version of Flux.
3 replies
17h19m
Why are they getting worse?
1 replies
13h8m
Because they don’t like the fact that the majority of custom content for uncensored models is hardcore porn.
0 replies
10h48m
Which honestly is rather silly for the companies making the models. The cat's already out of the bag, and if a competitor manages to make a similar/good-enough (uncensored) model there's nothing midjourney etc will have going for them.
Or as someone once said, if they took porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called "Bring Back the Porn!".
0 replies
16h9m
People who don’t use them are using their hobby of being offended to pressure the model makers to censor.
2 replies
18h7m
While I won't say that realism is a solved problem, SD has been able to produce unbelievably realistic photo-level images using "Realism Engine"/NightVisionXL/etc for a while now.
Flux's power isn't necessarily in its ability to produce realistic images, so much as its increased size gives it a FAR superior ability to more closely follow the prompt.
0 replies
10h4m
I hadn't seen Realism Engine, looks good. Check Boreal FD https://civitai.com/models/639937?modelVersionId=715729 for the kind of casual photography realism I was talking about. I don't remember seeing that quality with SD.
Also see https://civitai.com/models/652699/amateur-photography-flux-d...
and
0 replies
16h9m
Also to 'understand' complicated prompts (however far that goes when talking image models). For example, describing two subjects in detail with a relationship between them ("a cat and a man and the cat is standing on the man's head and the cat has red hair and the man is wearing purple glasses") reliably works with Flux, even the 'light' models, but is a crapshoot with SD.
2 replies
16h47m
Was heavily using StableDiffusion a handful of months ago. Seemed like new achievements were being made all the time.
What happened with 1.5 and newer? I’m out of the loop.
1 replies
10h8m
SD 1.5 was not censored. Later version were trained with the the censored data. A side of that was bad anatomy. Search for stable diffusion woman lying on grass. I think this was SD3. It generates monstrosities when you ask for a woman on grass.
I liked ideogram's approach. It looked like their training data was not censored as much (it still didn't render privates). The generated images are checked are tested for nudity before presenting to user, if found, image is replaced by a placeholder.
If you check SD reddit, community seems to have jumped ship to flux. It has great prompt adherence. You don't have to employ silly tricks to get what you want. Ideogram also has amazing prompt adherence.
0 replies
5h11m
We did have SDXL in-between, and while that one was also censored, the censoring has been long since removed in fine-tunes.
Flux is also censored, but in a way that doesn't usually break anatomy. It took about a week before people figured out how to start decensoring it.
22 replies
22h20m
Open to everyone, but you must have Google or Discord account. Has the definition of everyone changed?
8 replies
17h35m
Touché. But it's certainly leagues more "everyone" today than it was yesterday. It used to require arcane knowledge of deep Discord server bot navigation. I gave up after 20 minutes and never figured it out. Today I tried it in seconds.
I have about 40+ google accounts for reasons, so I don't begin to understand the aversion some have to registering a burner google/discord/facebook/etc account under their hampster's name, but many of my closest friends are just like you so I respect it anyway, whatever principle it is.
6 replies
15h45m
Where do you quickly get burner phone numbers for registration ?
3 replies
14h43m
why do you need a phone number for a google account?
2 replies
7h53m
Because Google asks for it to let you register.
1 replies
5h52m
Really? Wow. I have like 20 gmail accounts. I guess I got them before they started requiring phone numbers.
0 replies
5h34m
Do you use all 20 regularly? Because if you don’t, there’s a chance that next time you try to login to one of them on the web they’ll ask you to add a phone number and not let you continue until you do. But if you have them setup in an email client, it should still work.
1 replies
14h45m
0 replies
7h53m
The reviews don’t inspire any confidence.
0 replies
7h51m
I don't begin to understand the aversion some have to registering a burner google/discord/Facebook/etc
Maybe because several of those tend to ask for phone verification nowadays, and phone burner services tend to either not work or look so shady it looks like a major gamble to give them any payment information?
6 replies
18h59m
Open to everyone, but requires a computer. Has the definition of everyone changed?
5 replies
17h54m
Equating participating in walled garden social platforms to simply having a computer is bleak
2 replies
16h20m
Can you explain the difference between creating an anonymous google account with fake information compared to an anonymous midjourney account with fake information?
0 replies
10h19m
Creating fake accounts violates Google's terms of service.
0 replies
7h58m
Google accounts require a phone number. How do you reliably fake that internationally without risking your money on some shady service?
0 replies
16h50m
Pretending that someone can’t use your software because they don’t want to create a login through your providers is idiotic.
0 replies
15h22m
Nonsense. Creating a throwaway account takes a couple of minutes.
What a strangely deranged view of the world some people have.
1 replies
17h56m
I truly thought the title meant they are no longer tied to discord. Excited me for a minute
0 replies
16h6m
Yep. "Web experience" made me think there was an actual website experience. There still isn't a web experience and it's still not open to everyone. lol
1 replies
20h29m
Can everyone have a Google is Discord account?
0 replies
13h7m
Can everyone have a Google or* Discord account?
0 replies
20h31m
Anyone can sign up for one of those accounts. I don't really see why that would make this misleading
0 replies
19h26m
If your site or service only has social logins then it's a hard no from me.
21 replies
23h23m
This is a interesting company to watch in the Gen AI space since they don't have all the same restrictions as the bigger companies.
Crazy this took them so long, and also crazy that they got so far through a very confusing Discord experience.
3 replies
22h6m
Try creating something mocking Xi Jinping.
1 replies
20h49m
wait really? i'm not gonna sign up for midjourney but it's surprising to me that this would be restricted
0 replies
17h15m
Yep - they self-censor themselves according to China's whims, just so they can have China access now only to be banned by the great firewall 1 year from now after Chines startups scrape all their image outputs for training.
0 replies
17h13m
Why is AI needed for that? Political satire doesn't require anything more than adding a text balloon to an already existing picture.
2 replies
15h51m
space since they don't have all the same restrictions as the bigger companies.
Can you give an example? Midjourney is heavily censored so it seems like it has a lot of restrictions.
1 replies
14h51m
What are some examples of behaviors that would exemplify their heavy censorship?
0 replies
6h6m
try generating with the prompt "a spoony bard and a licentious howler", if you're willing to catch a ban for using ted woolsey's horrible, offensive language that was acceptable to 1990s nintendo of america
1 replies
20h15m
What was the confusing Discord experience? Was it that Discord was the main way to access Midjourney, and it was chaotic? I vaguely remember this, but didn't spend much time there.
0 replies
18h33m
The very fact that it was on discord in the first place was enough for me.
1 replies
22h12m
What do you mean by no restrictions? My account was flagged and under review after using two bold prompts.
0 replies
22h0m
The company doesn't have the same restrictions. They're not talking about the ai model.
1 replies
22h9m
what do you mean they don't have restrictions?
0 replies
22h3m
Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc all have to shoehorn these things into their products to stay on top, but it's not their core business and they don't want it to take away from their ads or licenses they sell. Midjourney as a company is much freer to innovate without the burden of the restrictions of an established company.
1 replies
10h49m
Maybe they got so far thanks to the Discord approach.
When you went to the Discord, you immediately got the endless stream of great looking stuff other people were generating. This was quite powerful way to show what is possible.
I bet one challenge for getting new users engaged with these tools is that you try to generate something, get bad results, get disappointed and never come back.
0 replies
5h10m
That's exactly true, and having built a similar bot for friends and acquaintances to use, the effect in question is huge. It makes no sense to go for a webapp first, second or even third.
1 replies
22h25m
Using discord is a great way to focus on what's important and get not great, but good enough ux and community tools basically for free.
0 replies
22h10m
That and you get user observability for free, and support injection in a way that to this day there’s no good way to do in an “app” experience.
Presuming your bot requires people to interact with it in public channels, your CSRs can then just sit in those channels watching people using the bot, and step in if they’re struggling. It’s a far more impactful way to leverage support staff than sticking a support interface on your website and hoping people will reach out through it.
It’s actually akin to the benefit of a physically-situated product demo experience, e.g. the product tables at an Apple Store.
And, also like an Apple Store, customers can also watch what one-another are doing/attempting, and so can both learn from one another, and act as informal support for one-another.
0 replies
22h1m
Haha, that was the craziest part about signing on midjourney, when you have to sign up via Discord
I don't use Discord on my office laptop, and that was very odd experience
0 replies
22h48m
Crazier still that they have been able to achieve what they have with zero external funding.
0 replies
17h16m
The only restrictions they have are that you can't imagine President Xi, nor can you mention anything PG-13 like bathing suits.
0 replies
2h29m
They did a clever thing, they used Discord and their servers as CDN
No hosting of the generated pictures, just send them via discord message and forget them. No S3 or big cloud lambda functions.
Easy to start to make a minimal working prototype.
12 replies
22h47m
Haven't used Midjourney since Flux dropped
6 replies
22h32m
where can we try/use? Is it just the obvious google result of https://getimg.ai/models/flux ?
2 replies
22h3m
Replicate, although not fully free, has the bonus of outputs from Flux (from their endpoints only) able to be used for commercial purposes whereas that is normally only applicable for Flux schnell:
1 replies
17h0m
Are you sure that's true?
https://github.com/black-forest-labs/flux/blob/main/model_li...
From the license: "We claim no ownership rights in and to the Outputs. You are solely responsible for the Outputs you generate and their subsequent uses in accordance with this License. You may use Output for any purpose (including for commercial purposes), except as expressly prohibited herein. You may not use the Output to train, fine-tune or distill a model that is competitive with the FLUX.1 [dev] Model."
This license seems to indicate that the images from the dev model CAN be used for commercial purposes outside of using those images to train derivative models. It would be a little weird to me that they'd allow you to use FluxDev images for commercial purposes IF AND ONLY IF the model host was Replicate.
0 replies
33m
Replicate has a special agreement outside the license, apparently, see the licensing: https://replicate.com/blog/fine-tune-flux
They also now just added a "Commercial friendly" tag to the endpoints above.
Yes, it's weird.
0 replies
22h17m
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYVucud3ptc has good coverage of running locally and via web (https://fal.ai/models)
0 replies
21h54m
Grok on Twitter Premium has Flux integrated.
0 replies
22h22m
Their Github repo provides some links if you want to try it online: https://github.com/black-forest-labs/flux
3 replies
22h16m
MJ has always been this pixar-style-hyperfit SD variant. It almost seemed to just repeat google images but with gloss.
Or at least a year ago it was like that.
0 replies
16h52m
That is the base style. You can get much different image qualities adding different types of film, cameras, etc to the prompt.
With that said, I loved Midjourney a year ago but I am at the point I have seen enough AI art to last several lives.
AI art reminds me of eating wasabi. It is absolutely amazing at first but I quickly get totally sick of it.
0 replies
21h31m
For a period I daily checked its best outputs page: the "pixar" style was frequent, but far from being the only one. "Typical" like 10 is the type (mode) in 10+9+9+8+8+7+7+6+6+5+5+4+4+3+3+2+2+1+1 - but still 10% of the whole and just one possibility of all.
Midlibrary.io recognizes 5500 styles Midjourney knows.
0 replies
18h46m
Here's a project I did over a year ago in Midjourney where I took all art for the card game Spectromancer and re-themed each piece in 26 different styles
0 replies
22h41m
Flux seems to give the backgrounds even more detail and coherence compared to MJ, it's a surprisingly (or maybe not given its size) great model.
8 replies
19h56m
And it still can't draw a spork yet [1]
3 replies
17h43m
MJ can't do it, but took me 10 seconds genning locally on an SDXL checkpoint:
https://gondolaprime.pw/pictures/sporks-generative.jpg
It's a rather arbitrary metric. All it proves is that the token "spork" wasn't in midjourney's training data. A FAR better test for adherence is how well a model does when a detailed description for an untrained concept is provided as the prompt.
2 replies
17h16m
Yup it's an arbitrary metric, but I tried cajoling various image models into generating spork pictures with highly detailed descriptions (I have ComfyUI & AUTOMATIC1111 locally, and many models), which lead to me creating the site.
I'd say a better test for adherence is how well a model does when the detailed description falls in between two very well known concepts - it's kinda like those pictures from the 1500s of exotic animals seen by explorers drawn by people using only the field notes after a long voyage back.
0 replies
17h12m
Welll.... there's a hundred ways we could measure prompt adherence everything from:
- Descriptive -> describing a difficult concept that is most certainly NOT in the training data
- Hybrids -> fusions of familiar concepts
- Platonic overrides -> this is my phrase for attempting to see how well you can OVERRIDE very emphasized training data. For example, a zebra with horizontal stripes.
etc. etc.
0 replies
17h15m
Here's a test against the full Flux Dev model where we try to describe the physical appearance of a spork without referencing it by name.
Prompt: A hybrid kitchen utensil that looks like a spoon with small tine prongs of a fork made of metal, realistic photo
https://gondolaprime.pw/pictures/flux-spork-like.jpg
The combination of T5 / clip coupled with a much larger model means there's less need to rely on custom LoRAs for unfamiliar concepts which is awesome.
EDIT: If you've got the GPU for it, I'd recommend downloading a copy of the latest version of the SD-WEBUI Forge repo along with the DEV checkpoint of Flux (not schnell). It's super impressive and I get an iteration speed of roughly 15 seconds per 1024x1024 image.
0 replies
17h34m
Haha, I thought it was just me. I was trying to generate a spork for a silly card game and was really frustrated/confused about what the issue was.
0 replies
19h22m
I asked DALL-E for a spork and it did it just fine.
0 replies
19h2m
prompt: "spork", model: "NovelAI v3" (aka finetuned SDXL)
0 replies
19h38m
I don't see midjourney on that site.
6 replies
22h47m
Flux, latest Midjourney, or even dall-e... I'm still disappointed that 3 of my sci-fi prompts never works (interior of an O'Neill Cylinder, Space elevator, rotating space station). I hope someone makes lora of those one day.
3 replies
22h41m
What prompts are you using for the space station? I think it pretty much nails it after some prompt tweaking.
First attempt:
https://cdn.midjourney.com/686f364f-188f-4065-813f-b45d21972...
Tweaking to specify spokes around the central axis:
https://cdn.midjourney.com/d18d3ad3-3fd0-461e-a3a8-5fc46f0ba...
1 replies
22h37m
Space Wagon Wheel
0 replies
22h31m
This makes me think the next generation needs an Oregon Trail type game for space travel.
0 replies
22h3m
Ah thanks, seems it got better at this one then ! I've tried the 2 other prompts with the latest but the space station I had only tried in v5.
0 replies
5h5m
"Halo, Interior of a cylindrical space station habitat, upside down, fields, lakes, rivers, housing, rivers running around cylinder roof, Rick Guidice artwork, in space, stars visible through windows"
https://cdn.midjourney.com/ed234782-ac5c-41d7-99e9-20ce122cd...
They definitely struggle with getting the land moving up the wall and often it treats the cylinder like a window onto earth at ground level but I think with tweaking the weighting or order of terms and enough rolls of the dice you could get it.
0 replies
22h38m
You can train your own lora online, https://replicate.com/ostris/flux-dev-lora-trainer/train
I think this is the most popular one right now online for Flux.
4 replies
20h54m
It's just astonishing to me how difficult it still seems to be for the Midjourney team to develop a web site that amounts to little more than a textbox, a button, and an img tag.
I tried their new web experience, and... it's just broken. It doesn't work. There's a showcase of other people's work, and that's it. I can't click the text-box, it's greyed out. It says "subscribe to start creating", but there's is no "subscribe" button!
Mindblowing.
3 replies
20h7m
There's a theory that Midjourney didn't want to pay for image hosting (which they were getting for free from Discord).
0 replies
16h54m
That must have been a LOOONNG time ago, I've been a user of MJ since ~version 3 a couple years back - and I remember custom scraping my images way back in the day and they were coming from Google Cloud Storage, e.g.
https://storage.googleapis.com/dream-machines-output/378f0f1...
0 replies
19h27m
That has got to be a rounding error in their finances in comparison to the GPU time required to generate the images in the first place.
0 replies
19h31m
Images has been available on their website for quite some time.
2 replies
18h10m
Ever since DALL-E 3 completely eclipsed Midjourney in terms of Prompt ADHERENCE (albeit not quality), I've had very little reason to make use of it. However, in my testing of Flux Dev, I can gen images in roughly 15 seconds in Forge, throw those at a SDXL model such as Dreamshaper in the form of a controlnet and get the best of both worlds, high detail and adherent.
0 replies
5h20m
Dall-E 3 (intentionally) leans away from realism though but in doing so what it leans into is a very tacky and aesthetically naive although competently executed type of image. Gives every image the feeling that you're seeing a bootleg version of a genuine thing and therefore makes everything else it touches feel tacky.
Same feeling you get looking at the airbrushed art on a state fairground ride.
0 replies
3h11m
In 15 seconds? Really? On my machine with good specs and a 4090 flux-dev takes around 400 seconds for 512x512! And flux-schnell at least half. Do you recommend a tutorial for optimization?
1 replies
22h52m
I have to say I'm very impressed. I've previously used free generators for generating scenery for my D&D campaign, and running a prompt here that previously took me dozens of tweaks to get something reasonable, instantly returned me a set of high quality images, at least one of which was much closer to my mind's eye than anything in those dozens of previous attempts.
( Prompting: An iron-gated door, set into a light stone arch, all deep set into the side of a gentle hill, as if the entrance to a forgotten crypt. The hill is lightly wooded, there is foliage in season. It is early evening. --v 6.1 )
And result: https://cdn.midjourney.com/5b56f713-3d64-471f-8c3c-08a0247e6...
The style matches exactly what I'd want too, it's captured "Fantasy RP book illustration" extremely well, despite that not being in the prompt!
0 replies
21h18m
Midjourney's "house style" leans towards fantasy by default.
1 replies
22h13m
I only see a form field for /imagine. How can I /describe?
The docs say to hover over the uploaded image or use the test tube icon from the sidebar, neither of which seem to be available on mobile.
0 replies
21h38m
I nave the same problem
1 replies
20h45m
I'm so glad that Midjourney and Flux is making creativity accessible to everyone, I don't need to have a subscription to MJ anymore now that Flux is getting better.
Everybody can now be an artist and have creativity for free now.
What a time to be alive.
0 replies
7h35m
Creativity has always been accessible to everyone. Creativity is a concept which only requires imagination. Those ideas can take many forms, including writing, cooking, sewing, doing skateboard tricks… It doesn’t mean rearranging pixels on screen by vaguely describing something.
1 replies
13h30m
Website contributor here! Answering some of the technical questions on Twitter: https://x.com/_chenglou/status/1826425720522080480
0 replies
11h24m
Why do I need a Gmail or Discord account to register ?
1 replies
21h31m
I can hear the 'coomers' posting with glee
0 replies
19h52m
MJ coomers? The same MJ that bans accounts for coomer content?
Not sure that will change just because of a new frontend.
1 replies
22h56m
What the really need is user management, so big corps can adopt it. Currently with the user self-service it‘s a no-go.
0 replies
22h21m
For a company workshop I wanted to pay for Midjourney to invite a bot into a private Discord with the workshop participants. We couldn't find a way of using it as a company account, and ultimately every participant had to get a sub, which was less than ideal. If it was today I would have them use Flux in some hosted version.
0 replies
22h46m
In iOS Safari I get
Unable to process request due to missing initial state. This may happen if browser sessionStorage is inaccessible or accidentally cleared. Some specific scenarios are - 1) Using IDP-Initiated SAML SSO. 2) Using signInWithRedirect in a storage-partitioned browser environment.
EDIT2: I have all the images I created on Discord in the web app - very nice!
0 replies
21h13m
I've been using it for a while and it's amazing :)
0 replies
21h41m
"Midjourney web experience is now open to everyone"...
"Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue"...
0 replies
2h56m
Its cool but this feels really late. I just use Ideogram now. The social features are nice
0 replies
2h1m
Access blocked: Midjourney’s request does not comply with Google’s policies
Midjourney’s request does not comply with Google’s ‘Use secure browsers’ policy. If this app has a website, you can open a web browser and try signing in from there. If you are attempting to access a wireless network, please follow these instructions.
You can also contact the developer to let them know that their app must comply with Google’s ‘Use secure browsers’ policy.
Learn more about this error
If you are a developer of Midjourney, see error details.
Error 403: disallowed_useragent
0 replies
22h19m
The splash screen locked up my fairly-recent Android phone. Like, I had to hard-reboot.
0 replies
1d1h
The Midjourney web experience is now open to everyone. We're also temporarily turning on free trials to let you check it out. Have fun!
0 replies
21h50m
Yes, I'm finding the "meh" here is expandable to most of the companies, and that's a great thing (e.g just got a $500 card and OpenHermes feels comparable to anything and it's running fully locally) I know there's often not a lot to be optimistic about, but the fact that so called "AI" is absolutely de-facto free/open source is perhaps just about the best way this stuff could roll out.
0 replies
20h45m
Seems to be a direct response to Black Forest Labs' Flux being offered on Twitter with a lot of uptake.
Yes, unfortunately. That’s a no-go for me.
I feel like this is an old man yells at cloud moment but I refuse to link social media or google accounts with other services.
Why should Google's or Discord's policy dictate my participation in the web?
Why not just make another google account that you solely use for registration in services like these? Use a virtual machine with VPN if you really do not want it to be linked with your real account.
It is a bit of extra work but that's just how it is nowadays.
Does not google require a telephone number to create accounts nowadays? In some regions there are no anonymous SIM cards by law. (Temporary number services may not work well.)
Midjourney is a paid-only service anyway, you would need to enter your credit card, so no anonymity.
There do exist anonymous credit cards, paid with cash, for fixed relatively small amounts (e.g. ~100u. In Europe there are restrictions to these kind of payment methods - cards must be below, I believe, 150€).
The issue is you have to disclose your phone number to Google, not (just) to Midjourney, AND Google will know you use Midjourney.
There's too much unnecessary connected PII data generated by such mechanisms.
It is very much possible to create temporary credit cards linked to your real bank account for one-off purchases. Apple Card provides that as a service (US only) and other countries have similar systems that every bank adheres to.
Plus, you may not mind not being anonymous to Midjourney but mind not being anonymous to some other service (like Google).
I think the only way to make a google account without a phone number these days is to factory reset an android phone and take the sim out beforehand.
If that even still works...
I am pretty sure that if any account I own at Google is caught violating policy, all other accounts are subject to being disabled.
Because the alternative is pretty provably worse for you, and for them.
* You have to save your (hopefully unique!) email/password in a password manager which is effectively contradictory to your "I won't use a cloud service" argument.
* The company needs to build out a whole email/password authentication flow, including forgetting your password, resetting your password, hints, rate limiting, etc etc, all things that Google/Apple have entire dedicated engineering teams tackling; alternatively, there are solid drop-in OAuth libraries for every major language out there.
* Most people do not want to manage passwords and so take the absolute lazy route of reusing their passwords across all kinds of services. This winds up with breached accounts because Joe Smith decided to use his LinkedIn email/password on Midjourney.
* People have multiple email addresses and as a result wind up forgetting which email address/password they used for a given site.
Auth is the number one customer service problem on almost any service out there. When you look at the sheer number of tickets, auth failures and handholding always dominate time spent helping customers, and it isn't close. If Midjourney alienates 1 potential customer out of 100, but the other 99 have an easier sign-in experience and don't have to worry about any of the above, that is an absolute win.
All very thoughtful arguments but I think this solution to these problems is flawed. I don't believe we should be solving authentication management problems by handing over all authentication capabilities and responsibilities to one or two mega companies.
Especially since those companies can wield this enormous power by removing my access to this service because I may or may not have violated a policy unrelated to this service.
There has to be a better way.
There is: passkeys and alternative password managers.
While we are all waiting for the world to sort these problems out, companies that are not interested in solving them for the world will continue to use SSO techniques.
I’m very not impressed by this deep, extended critique of machine learning researchers using common security best practices on the grounds that those practices involve an imperfect user experience for those requiring perfect anonymity…
there's web3, where users have a private key and the public key is on a cryptocurrency chain, but adoption there has been slow. there's also a number of problems with that approach, but that's the other option on the table.
I want to believe, but sadly there's no market for it. unless someone wants to start a privacy minded alternative to auth0, and figure out a business model that works , which is to say, are you willing to pay for this better way? are there enough other people willing to pay a company for privacy to make it a lucrative worthwhile business? because users are trained to think that software should be free-as-in-beer but unfortunately, developing software is expensive and those costs have to be recouped somehow. people say they want to pay, but revealed preferences are they don't.
You make it sound untenable to support email/password auth, but given that the vast majority of low tech and high tech online services manage it just fine, I think you might be exaggerating a bit. Since Midjourney is already outsourcing their auth flow, they could just as easily use a third party that supports the most common form of account creation.
> People have multiple email addresses and as a result wind up forgetting which email address/password they used for a given site.
Effectively you mean that people have multiple Google accounts?
All of what you say may well be true, and yet: everyone else on the internet manages to make it work.
Password managers don't have to be cloud services. The user gets to choose.
Some of us like to use a different email address for each account on purpose.
Yeah, they should add Github support.
So google will rank them higher in search results?
They probably don’t want to deal with email registration workflows and want to limit themselves to OAuth, but that’s not user/customer-friendly.
While I understand that they might need some account or token to stop abuse, just having my sign in is a big no for anything I just want to try out. After the whole social media trend more or less collapsed into a privacy invading data collection nightmare, I've been extremely reluctant to sign up for anything.
You honestly think giving full, no rate limited free access is viable in the LLM space, where each execution is actually pretty expensive?
Because that's what you're asking for, as it'd be trivial to reset the rate without accounts.
Chatgpt does it
No, it doesn't. you need to register for chatgpt.
go try it right now lol
i assume they still have ip/browser fingerprint based rate limiting, but you can type in a prompt and get an answer with zero login or anything else.
I'm prompted for a login/register. You're likely authenticating via Apple or Google social auth
ChatGPT.com no longer requires registration to it ChatGPT-3.5.
No no, I understand that it's not a viable financial option, I just don't understand that anyone would trust any of these companies with any sort of information.
Most of the current AI companies are going to fail or get bought up, so you have no idea where that account information, all your prompts and all the answers will eventually go. After social media, I don't really see any reason why anyone would trust any tech company with any sort of information, unless you really really have to. If I want to run an LLM, then I'll get one that can run on my own computer, even if that mean forgoing certain features.