Yeah. You got it.

And sure you can hop on vocitai and download a model or lora or lycoris or comfyui workflow or whatwver. But we’re only at the beginning stages of ai.

Like. Face swapping is mainly done with with the inswapper. Onnx model which was pulled by insight face after it started making the rounds in the face swapping applicarion roop. It’s all well and good for hobbyist face swapping image gen but it’s a 128 bit model and low res. It kind of makes a blurry mess on larger images. Insight face has higher resolution models available but they’re not public, and to my knowledge there aren’t any viable alternative to this model that can match the same speed and accuracy. So everyone is out here playing with sticks and rocks while those who can play have shoyn new things.

There are very valid concerns about the harmful potential of deep fakes and I can understand how the models creator didn’t want to take responsibility for enabling that. But if, say, google wanted to use that or a similar closed source in house model to deep fake CASM for propaganda purposes or the same for political leaders, celebrities, not only does the public not have access to those models to understand how it’s being done and identify artifacts of that process, they lack the ability to “fight back” in any meaningful way.

To be clear I don’t think the above is, or is inevitably going to happen, but it highlights the asymmetric nature of ai that big tech wants. It doesn’t even have to be such high stakes. If you wanted to, say, swap out your son’s face for Luke Skywalker on the star wars movie for a Christmas present or something that’s something that would be challenging to do locally and convincingly with the right model, but barring thst could instead be forced to pay an absurdly high price by a private company or denied entirely due to fear of copyright infringement, even though I’m relatively certain doing that and not releasing it publicly falls purely in the realm of fair use.

And then there’s text, speech, audio generation. What happens if the tech gets good enough for someone to spend a few hours setting up some parameters for some pop songs with vocals, hits go, and generates music as consistently appealing as what we hear on the radio? And when no one else can access that tech? They’re able to pay artists nothing and basically produce free content wed have to pay for. If the public had access to that same tech then artists would still have a role in making popular music, even if the landscape had shifted totally. Either way the music business as we know it does, but there’s one option where creative people can still make money independently without getting on big techs sick to do so.

It’s a complicated issue and the ethics of it are fraught no matter where you look, but take one look at how cynically terrible all of googles products are getting and I think it’s painfully obvious we can’t trust them and their ilk with some access to this kind of tech.