> Machine learning requires lots of hardware - that's the best moat these companies can have. NVIDIA GPU's and Google TPU's are what's to be concerned about here.

With each concurrent generation the cost to produce the tools necessary with decrease exponentially as hardware also become more freely available. I don't see hardware as a limiting factor. Though the two monopolies have been known to work together to slow down technological progress. Honestly I think that our progress would likely have gone a lot faster without them. But for some strange reason they would rather follow moore's law. I don't really believe moore's law exists, there's limits to everything and the rules they mention are unsustainable and unrealistic. It makes me wonder where the real end of it is or if we've made the wrong decisions along the way solely for profit motive. How many times has funding been cut for research programs simply because nothing happened for a single quarter?

Like most Generative Artificial Networks, DALLE-2 is not really anything new. In the computer graphics field several research groups have been discussing similar techniques for decades. I've even seen a few demos by various colleges of their own implementations. The idea that DALLE is the future next step for several fields such as art is misleading at best and straight up delusional at worst. The main reason I state the issues within DALLE-2 not being fixed is mainly due to these factors. It's the wrong direction for this type of problem especially so for the billions of parameters that they use. The hyperfixation that google is attempting to do to this industry for it's own financial interests will pigeonhole several companies towards suboptimal solutions that will at best give them a somewhat workable solution at an expensive price. This of which will likely bankrupt them in the process as even with improvements to techniques will still cost them in the millions to produce even a few of these samples simply due to the labor cost involved.

While the art industry has been transformed by the technology industry through the gig economy intentionally for this purpose. Even at those rates you still end up with the cost of producing the models being outcompeted by the value provided. This is especially true as art improves overtime, the level of detail and fidelity along with varying art styles. Not to mention the fact it is an unsustainable model that prey on artists by systemically abusing them by turning them into slaves. But who am I say that it won't just collapse. After all companies such as walt disney, pixar, and dreamworks have been known for doing just this for decades. As other countries build "incentive" plans to systemically enslave their workers as well to outsource the art work towards studios abroad as well this likely won't change. Even the best animation studios such as Studio Ghibli only pay just above the poverty line. While it's never been my dream to draw or even write the idea that people of any kind being subject to abuse is something that I can't bear to see. All I can say is my deep hate for this never ending rat race. I always find it interesting when I read about these algorithms how the people who read, learn and create them seemingly have no sense of empathy for those that they seem to see as beneath them. Though I'm not claiming to say that you, yourself are to blame or are even contributing towards it. It's just something that bothers me.

Anyways, continuing on towards copyright. It's interesting to me how these datasets are generated is through the theft of artwork. I've already mentioned the labor cost involved in generating their own datasets and to mention it's unlikely anyone besides google will be able to afford to get away with this simply due to the magnitude of the lawsuit they would face. (It would likely be class action.) It always makes me wonder just how detrimental such as case would be and the effects of it due to how the U.S. Judicial System works. Though Silicon Valley has always been known for it's corruption and bribing of government officials, who knows? They might win. But it doesn't necessarily mean it will affect the entire industry as a whole but it might. It's interesting because there are already several papers on this matter that show that these neural networks work by copying those images. But you'll never know how a company like google can spin that. I always found it interesting that programmers think of machine learning as a black box.

The tool itself is largely unaffordable for large scale implementation and you would be better off working on other GAN's instead to help artists. Of course there's no one size fits all solution to this problem even though google would like to claim otherwise the quality of the images are useless for professionally done products without requiring heavy altercations. Teaching an entire generation to rely on this tool is likely going to end up counterproductive especially if it results in them losing the fine skills that are required to be developed for the task. I can see this going in several ways that could all end up horribly such as younger artists being forced to draw for the models themselves or being forced to be turned in essentially a data encoder writing labels for the dataset without having an practical skills or learning much. Or in how it's currently going the work being forced into sweatshop like conditions in 3rd world countries with an English speaking majority. Worsening the existing caste system within this industry. Maybe we'll see snip bits of it like on the tags of our jeans and tee shirts secretly hidden away, when a member of the upper caste clicks to generate an image instead what's returned are the words help me no food no water instead. The respective employee fired after attribution of the code is uncovered. Or on a lighter note artists secretly drawing penises on everything in order for the neural network to secretly generate penises on every image it draws.

I'm frankly upset. Not at you but an industry. Sorry if this sounds like a tangent or if it sound like I'm blowing up on you.

While the ideas mentioned may sound like my own they are not. While I'm unable to give sources to whose they are but I stand behind them.