Sharing is Caring

For a while now I’ve been discussing with LAION on a way to use the power of the horde to help them in some fashion. After coordination with hlky from the Sygil.dev crew, I decided to provide an opt-in mechanism for people to store their text2img stable diffusion generations in an alternative storage bucket. This bucket in turn will be provided to LAION so that they can use it for aesthetic training, or for other similar purposes.

So today I finally released this new mode. For clients it’s a simple flag during the payload. Set “share” to True, and your request will be uploaded to the specific storage bucket. This will also save me infrastructure costs as I will not have to pay for the storage out of my own pocket for these.

To give a further incentive for people to turn this on, and because I wanted a way to show the cost of running the horde, I have also implemented a “horde tax” kudos burn. Every time you generate an image, the overall kudos cost is then increased by 3. This signifies the overall resource cost of passing through the horde, such as bandwidth, i/o and storage. However, if you opt to turn on the sharing switch, the overall “tax” is just +1 kudos.

You might ask, why not make the cost proportional to the overall kudos cost. Something like +30%/+10%. The reason is that the overall kudos cost is dependent on how difficult it is for the workers to generate that image. From the perspective of the horde, a 512x512x50 image is not much different from a 1024x1024x300 image, even though the latter would take an order of magnitude more time to generate.

In fact, many small requests are technically worse for the horde infrastructure costs, than a few small ones. It’s not that I want to discourage the small ones though, because they are actually good for the horde workers (and thus the overall generation speed). Therefore the “tax” is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things. Just a bit of extra “burn”.

One important thing to note however, is that anonymous accounts image generations are always shared. This is part of my general strategy where I want to discourage anonymous use of the horde. It just more difficult to manage the load when people are using it like that. This is why anonymous has the lowest priority and the most restrictions. And now they will always help provide data to LAION as well.

Finally, img2img and inpainting requests are never shared. This is because those are based on existing images and I cannot know if someone used some personal photo at low strength or something. So I prefer to err on the side of caution.

This is not the last support the AI Horde plans to give to LAION either. We are already working on new features like an aesthetic rating trainer and so on. I hope this sort of assistance can be put to good use for the benefit of all humanity!