this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
173 points (96.8% liked)

Technology

83696 readers
1088 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Microsoft quietly added a new AI feature, called Cocreator, into its raster graphics editor included in every version of Windows since 1985. You need a Copilot + PC with an NPU that can deliver 40 TOPS or better to use it. So, you need to shell out at least $1,099 to get one of the new Snapdragon X Windows Copilot+ PCs that launched recently if you want your version of Microsoft Paint to come with Cocreator enabled.

However, Microsoft still requires you to sign in with your Microsoft account and be connected to the internet “to ensure safe use of AI.” According to Microsoft’s Privacy Statement, “Cocreator uses Azure online services to help ensure the safe and ethical use of AI. These services do content filtering to prevent the generation of harmful, offensive, or inappropriate content. Microsoft collects attributes such as device and user identifiers, along with the user prompts, to facilitate abuse prevention and monitoring. Microsoft does not store your input images or generated images.”

This is a nightmare for security and privacy-conscious users, especially as Microsoft recently blocked the last easy workaround to set up Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Microsoft is likely doing this to stop unscrupulous users from generating illegal images like child and non-consensual deep fake pornography. However, storing this information is also a source of concern, as prompts a user typed in and stored on their account could be stolen. And, no matter how innocent, it could then be weaponized and used against them.

all 46 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 126 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Or just use Krita with the AI plugin offline and local completely free, even without a GPU (if you have time to wait).

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Oh no. That's unethical!

/s

[–] best_username_ever@sh.itjust.works 20 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It definitely is. Microsoft said that open source is bad cancer.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Was a reference to the thread next door that revealed - horror of horrors - that photos of children were part of the training data. Sure, you never know who is behind these hit pieces, but there doesn't really need to be anyone behind it.

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Bill founded the entire company on monetizing open source code from software enthusiasts across the world. If anyone knows what open source means, it‘s them.

[–] ArtVandelay@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago

holy shit, i just tried it, and this is amazing, thank you!

[–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Would be cool to be AI horde compatible and just ditch the GPU requirements entirely.

I don't think everyone got a GPU that could run stable diffusion easily, even more for laptops

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

You don't have to run the AI stuff on the same computer running Krita. At home I have my gaming PC set up for that for the whole family. And if I recall correctly the plugin also promotes a specific cloud service, but you can enter any URL to a compatible service.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The thing is that AI Horde relies on donated hardware. There are only so many people willing to donate relative to people who want to use.

Vast.ai lets people rent hardware, but not on a per-operation basis. That's cheaper then buying and keeping it idle a lot of the time, reduces costs, but it's still gonna have idle time.

I think what would be better is some kind of service that can sell compute time on a per-invocation basis. Most of the "AI generation services" do thus, but they also entail that you use their software.

So, it's expensive to upload models to a card, and you don't want tonnage to re-upload a model for each run. But hash the model and remember what the last thing run on the card is. If someone queues a run with the same model again, just use the existing uploaded model.

Don't run the whole Stable Diffusion or whatever package on the cloud machine.

That makes the service agnostic to the software involved. Like, you can run whatever version of whatever LLM software you want and use whatever models. It makes the admin-side work relatively light. It makes sure that the costs get covered, but people aren't having to pay to buy hardware that's idle a lot of the time.

Might be that some service like that already exists, but if so, I'm not aware of it.

[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 45 points 2 years ago

especially as Microsoft recently blocked the last easy workaround to set up Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Microsoft is likely doing this to stop unscrupulous users from generating illegal images like child and non-consensual deep fake pornography.

Somehow I doubt that's the reason.

[–] rem26_art@fedia.io 42 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

"Yeah i just spent over a grand on a laptop just so I could use MS paint fully"

[–] Anamana@feddit.de 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

..to its full potential 💪💪

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

...and ethically!

[–] SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip 35 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Can we have AI-capable PCs without the cloud nonsense please? Isn't the whole point of local AI to reduce cloud reliance?

[–] cley_faye@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago

We already have them. Just don't touch any big corporation stuff and suddenly everything work without requiring the blessing of a corporate overlord. There's already open source tools, either open or freely accessible models, and the tooling, while relatively knew, keep improving. All working locally.

Heck, even performances improves in unexpected ways. This week I ran a chatbot at an almost acceptable speed on a cheap CPU.

As long as some politician don't come out and outlaw software as a whole (good luck with that) we'll be fine.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I would assume not if you're Microsoft!

I fired up Halo single-player on Steam the other day and was reminded that Microsoft doesn't let you play unless you sign in to your Microsoft account.

[–] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's an accountability issue. I'm sure there's several countries that will require accountability and filtering for illegal artwork, so this is the only way to ensure it can be done.

They could make it work entirely offline, but there would be no safeguards.

Technically, someone could write a version of the ai gen tools that work on these new NPUs, then you can have a new machine with an NPU and still use open source / self host / local only tools (Krita's ai plugin, for example).

45 TOPS is a little less than half what an RTX 2060 can do, which is 102 TOPS, for comparison. But the power usage on these new NPUs is way lower.

[–] Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

You can't make art about Mario

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 22 points 2 years ago

its raster graphics editor included in every version of Windows since 1985

Incredibly misleading. The new version of Paint in Windows 11 is a completely different piece of software, and older versions of Windows (10 and below) will not have this function.

The day I can no longer use Windows 10 will be the day I move to Linux. I've already started using virtual machines for certain things so maybe performance will go up there.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

This is a nightmare for security and privacy-conscious users, especially as Microsoft recently blocked the last easy workaround to set up Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Microsoft is likely doing this to stop unscrupulous users from generating illegal images like child and non-consensual deep fake pornography.

So, just don't include this dumbshit "feature" in your product which no one appears to actually want anyway? Seems pretty simple to me.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 6 points 2 years ago

Yeah but if they did that they wouldn't be able to snoop and steal content from their users.

It utterly disgusts me that Microsoft charges you for the software they use to harvest your data. At least Facebook and Google can maintain the facade that it's an exchange of data for access to the service (it never was).

[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 years ago

You are fired. - Bill Microsoft

[–] NutWrench@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

Why would I spend money on computer hardware that benefits no one but Microsoft?

[–] Etterra@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

I wish somebody would figure out how to lock up online integrated AI with some kind of recursive nonsense or something.