Remove racist filter on artists.csv or explain

[Conobi]

Recent events on the GitHub account ban of AUTOMATIC1111 brought to light the fact that weirdly, a lot of black artists (or artists that promotes art that shows black people) have been categorized as n in the artists.csv file.

This could have been considered a simple bug/loophole and not seen as evil or racist, but some very questionable minded mods created by AUTOMATIC1111 (+ others questionable things, e.g being part of facists Discord channels) mean that it can only be seen as a way to exclude black artists when using this feature.

Me and other people in the community want explanation on this because this is totally unacceptable to promote exclusion on a project that let everybody to create things.

We want true steps taken in the way of banning racism and exclusion on this project.

Context

See

stable-diffusion-webui/artists.csv

Line 207 in f8d0cf6

Howardena Pindell,0.7686921,n

for an example.

There are 15 black artists in the n category ; and also Mati Klarwein which is a french white artist that paints black people.

---

UPDATE :

Beyond this question of racism, let's remember that GitHub closed Automatic1111's account for sharing NSFW models just below images of drawn children (Textual Inversion wiki page):
[link]

With some common sense, is it normal to keep a person who puts forward racist mods and NSFW drawing of children as the maintainer of a tool that carries a whole industry?
I don't think so.

[N-hill88]

Enough about the n filter, where is the k filter?

[dramatard]

lmaooo

[Yasand123]

Well, Jean-Michel Basquiat (number 8) is black and he's not in the category "n". He's in "scribbles". There's probably more.

[econundrum]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unbOFwUwWN0

According to this video at least one artist in the n list is not black.

But a single letter category is not helpful anyway since it doesn't tell you what it is.

[grexzen]

Seems like Auto just added a bunch of 1 letter variables in lots of places, I have seen the 'c' before.

But he has been coding like a mad man for months, so it is understandable.

[vt-idiot]

¿Qué tienes contra el idioma español? ¿Quién es el racista ahora?

[Nacurutu]

@vt-idiot jajajajajajaja... cuidado y se van en contra de la RAE una vez mas xD

[Nicoolodion]

I find it very sad that a person who has made such a good SD webui (I know that he doesn't code it himself) is a racist... Right now I am not that sure if I should still use that webui or change it... Everything points out that he is racist...

[Broccoli-nyu]

If it bothers you that much... just don't use this webui.

[Nacurutu]

If it bothers you that much... just don't use this webui.

[grexzen]

Weird how all these people that has not contributed anything so far love to complain and demand stuff.

Classic.

[aleksusklim]

vt-idiot

Ну, идиот какой-то, понятно.

([/sarcasm])

[mcmonkey4eva]

@N-hill88 there isn't a k filter, what?

---

@Donokami bit of an overreaction posting this. Note that the artists.csv file does not originate from Auto. I'm not sure where the copy in use came from, but I can say most of the files content can found elsewhere, eg clip_interrogator has the name list (minus weights/categories) https://github.com/pharmapsychotic/clip-interrogator/blob/1080560c48daf421ebf44f4791840e4db947bc01/data/artists.txt
I strongly doubt Auto personally ran through the list and categorized them all himself, he quite likely downloaded the list from elsewhere.
It's certainly a bad look for that to come out, but I really doubt Auto had any intentionally regarding specifics of the listing, he just wanted a list of known artists to pull from and found one somewhere.

It's possible the categories came from running through some form of autoclassification (per implication he made in link below).

---

Regarding the list itself,

The single-letter artists.csv content is:

Howardena Pindell,0.7686921,n
Alain Laboile,0.67634284,c
Julie Blackmon,0.72862685,c
Mati Klarwein,0.7066092,n
Barkley L. Hendricks,0.69986427,n
Carrie Mae Weems,0.6645416,n
Barkley Hendricks,0.6883637,n
Yinka Shonibare,0.68256056,n
Zanele Muholi,0.58554715,n
Kehinde Wiley,0.66218376,n
RETNA (Marquis Lewis),0.47963,n
Wangechi Mutu,0.6394607,n
William-Adolphe Bouguereau,0.618265,c
Bapu,0.6122084,c
Robert Irwin,0.58078,c
Cassius Marcellus Coolidge,0.5805516,c
Kadir Nelson,0.5669006,n
Dr. Seuss,0.5597466,c
Amadou Opa Bathily,0.5536976,n
Juliana Huxtable,0.5364195,n
Henning Jakob Henrik Lund,0.5147134,c
Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy,0.49445248,n
Teophilus Tetteh,0.46064255,n
Bruce Onobrakpeya,0.42588046,n

n and c are the only two unclear short lists. Auto has previously commented that these are probably categorization errors, ref #166 (comment) and was intending to fix them, but never got around to it.

[Cyberes]

The n stands for bmlnZ2VyCg==

[mumbleskates]

@mcmonkey4eva n-hill88 is clearly a nazi. hope this helps clarify what's going on there for you

[Conobi]

Well, Jean-Michel Basquiat (number 8) is black and he's not in the category "n". He's in "scribbles". There's probably more.

Yep! It has already been discussed on Reddit.
That's why, without context we could think that this is just a malformed category, and just a bug.
But given the context that AUTOMATIC1111 made a George Floyd mod and a white only mod, it is still questionable.

That's why we want changes and a direction given im the opposit way of exclusion/racism.

[Yasand123]

There's a lot of possibilities, that list could've been compiled from different sources, and one of the sources was written by a person who wanted to organize artists by their ethnicity. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Also, there are black people who aren't in the "n" category, so if this list was manually written by auto, and if he was racist as you suggest, don't you think he would also put Jean-Michel Basquiat in the "n" category as well? Since he's at the very top. I didn't look up all the names, but I guarantee there's a lot more black artists who aren't in the n category besides Basquiat. The entire argument is based on assumptions and incomplete data.

[mclsugi]

I like Basquiat
I, in the contrary, wants a 'b' filter so as southeast asian brown I can find other artist like Raden Saleh or Basuki Abdullah.

There's a lot of 'n' artist not included in 'n' if the 'n' is really what you think it is. Why so sensitive anyway?

[ghost]

The category classified by the alphabet n is unacceptable. The alphabet for Modern English is a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. In English, the alphabets N and n are ethnic slurs against black people, especially African Americans.

[dramatard]

Its high time we remove N from the Exglish alphabet. There is really xo reasox to allow such blataxt racism on the ixterxet ix 2023

[RLArt2022]

Its high time we remove N from the Exglish alphabet. There is really xo reasox to allow such blataxt racism on the ixterxet ix 2023
on
n-kill fail

[verywiseman2]

"questionable minded mods" What is this? Maoist struggle session?
Code is open source. Fix it yourself and put a pull request.

[N-hill88]

@mcmonkey4eva that's the problem, 109 filters isn't enough.

[67372a]

Allow me to simplify this for people with no common sense, regardless of your political, ethical, or moral leanings, having things like this gives ammo to people who would love nothing more than get SD restricted or banned, OR paint any users or creators as being racists, pedos, etc.

This is so trivial to address there is really no excuse other than laziness, or intent. Fix the classifications, change the names of the categories, or just delete N and C. C is a whole additional can of worms for anyone who bothered checking.

Any individual's personal view of what is "fair", "right", and a "freedom" doesn't matter on private platforms, in the court of public opinion, or in a court of law.

Throwing red herrings and arguing these points is meaningless.

[yunginnanet]

nailed it.

[Yasand123]

Fair point, but there's nothing wrong with "n" or "c" assuming n stands for black and c for child/children. I personally would want even more classifications and tags. Wait until this person sees the tags used in training data, they'd probably call the creator a sick person just for adding tags to everything.

[a1270]

I find it very sad that a person who has made such a good SD webui (I know that he doesn't code it himself) is a racist... Right now I am not that sure if I should still use that webui or change it... Everything points out that he is racist...

The fact you and the OP associates the letter 'n' with a horrible racial slur says more about you two than the dev. Maybe you should concentrate on being less racist yourself.

Well, Jean-Michel Basquiat (number 8) is black and he's not in the category "n". He's in "scribbles". There's probably more.

Yep! It has already been discussed on Reddit. That's why, without context we could think that this is just a malformed category, and just a bug. But given the context that AUTOMATIC1111 made a George Floyd mod and a white only mod, it is still questionable.

That's why we want changes and a direction given im the opposit way of exclusion/racism.

As a french citizen have you yourself apologized for your role your country has played in the slave trade and racism in general? Will you personally be paying recuperation for what your country has done and continues to do to the people of Africa?

[Nicoolodion]

Isn't it a bit weird that all the artist who have "n" after it are black? isn't it weird that together with the fact that he created a white mod for a game? Everything together comes to the point that says that he is a racist... Or tolerates it...

[vt-idiot]

and a white only mod

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1518808526
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1520519582

context matters. and in this case, "context" is a joke. grow thicker skin. address actual racism causing actual problems, instead of grasping at straws, and drawing inference (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) and making wild conclusions from a single bloody letter

[yunginnanet]

read the peacefulprotestors mod source code.

it's racist.

you are defending a racist for no reason.

[acheong08]

read the peacefulprotestors mod source code.

Did you?

[AnonymousCervine]

I am unclear as to how a bunch of off-colour race jokes makes the context any better here—the supposition of the OP in the first place was that tagging things 'n' was an off-colour race joke, no...?

This repo may have been born from 4chan, and maintained in part by it, but it would be slightly sad if efforts on it became fragmented because it couldn't grow past the crass and peurile humour of those origins. Addressing appearances somewhat here is therefore also potentially an ultimately functional task—whatever the original intent, or lack thereof, was.

[econundrum]

Racism or not aside clearly for these groups to be useful their labels have to be clear so why the single letter labels, what's "c". For all we know "n" might not stand for what we think it does and the artists in that group might have something else in common as well as being "Black".

But as it stands poorly labelled groups and groups that aren't about style are pretty useless objectively as well as objectionable.

[mile6919]

What do you think "n" stands for? Let me know as I don't know.

[Inosss]

What do you think "n" stands for? Let me know as I don't know.

Normal? Nomination? Nationwide? Or other 39231 words: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-that-start-with-n
But no, you think only for one word, right? One of 39231. I think all you are racist.

Or that's exactly the word. And what's next?

[acheong08]

People arguing about a single letter when the reason the user got taken down was because of suspicious links. Can we all just move on from this?

[mile6919]

Normal? Nomination? Nationwide? Or other 39231 words: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-that-start-with-n But no, you think only for one word, right? One of 39231. I think all you are racist.

Or that's exactly the word. And what's next?

I didn't think that one word you think I thinked. :)
Black people are biggest and most common users of THAT n-word, but that is not problem. Problem is - as they think - when someone non-black usest THAT n-word. Double standards... :)

[Nacurutu]

Guys, you have new assignments:

Go and report this Website that sales SUPER N T-Shirts

https://splastroke.threadless.com/designs/super-n/mens/t-shirt

(Not sponsored post)

Go and report this Instagram account, the.n.network

https://www.instagram.com/the.n.network/?hl=es

and they also have a Twitter account, OMG, act quick.

https://twitter.com/the_n_network

Go and report this Spotify radio account, The N

https://open.spotify.com/artist/5mLbQ7c6GbhWvOctHy128I

Heyyyy.. loook... an n with a moustache, outrageous.

and thats it...

[Exozze]

[Nosserkrasser]

If you feel the urge to do politics, please go to Twitter or Facebook.

[vt-idiot]

[re0ah]

First world problems.

[PochtiPRO]

The first thing to do, for sure, is to limit the retards from being able to choose. That's when pedophilia with children, "textual racism," and perhaps even ordinary racism would disappear dramatically!

[washinoboku]

The A1111 repo has grown so fast that it could soon be a threat, and owners of private code programs are afraid they will not receive money for similar work.

[uselessvevo]

What is wrong with you?

[escape209]

Trying to strongarm a project by invoking race where it wasn't before. But nah, he's the racist one.

[megapro17]

Z

[AnonymousCervine]

I've been pondering things like this for a while. A small tangential rant:

Frankly, before worrying about the social implications of this repo, consider the legal ones: IANAL so take everything I say hereafter with a serious grain of salt, but licensing in this repo is legal hell; no license, open-source or otherwise, was ever specified (see #2059 ). People ask in that thread to add a license, but actually taking it to any specific license now is effectively legally untenable, with all these contributors (anyone who's contributed up to now could object). Which if I understand correctly means at this point that nobody, legally, has the rights to even use this repo, because of copyright issues. If so, I do believe Automatic1111 can't actually legally take it to another license, either, at this point (they don't own sole copyright; there are myriad contributors). It's operating strictly under the presumption that no one is going to sue anyone.

With that in mind, my personal conclusion has been that the smorgasbord of cultural questions that came with the territory of this repo being born from 4chan are sort of almost (though certainly not completely) irrelevant. This repo can never legally be anything but a hobbyist platform, or at best a reference implementation for other things (though anyone can use it if they don't mind risking a lawsuit). The maintainer, accordingly, gains little except potential recognition by hosting this repo, so I'm personally somewhat-less concerned than I could be about their general personal proclivities and/or potential questionable worldviews (except in any instances where it affects the repo)—in fact in some theoretical universe where Automatic1111 were my friend, I would at this point instead have advised them to stop and take down this repo before they get hit by a copyright troll. (It's probably one of the most-contributed-to un-licensed projects on GitHub, getting targeted is, while not necessarily likely, seemingly a real possibility).

In short, objectively, this is already a terrible place for the community to be focusing their collective efforts. In fact, if I understand copyright law correctly (major grain of salt, again), everyone who contributes is putting themselves at a very slight risk of trollish copyright suits (Bluntly: There's a reason my account name here starts with "Anonymous" and works on no other projects! Though the risk is probably minimal in practice).

On the other other hand, this is where the community is focusing their efforts. Pragmatically, for a hobbyist, that makes it a desirable place to be, even if it also happens to be a dumpster fire waiting to happen. And given, you know, everything I've just said... therein lies a small conundrum. The highly, er, internet-culture-leaning biases of some of those involved with the repo might potentially add to that conundrum, but again run into the same problem and conflicts of long-term/short-term interests of anyone interested in SD.

On the upside (???), it's not horribly unlikely that the Next Big Totally Different Thing after SD-style image-generation will come along and make this repo obsolete before it implodes and/or the community has to ever do any serious soul-searching! So there's that.

[verywiseman2]

What is perplexing is people entertaining the idea of what the letter "n" means and demanding answers and wasting time to make "them" happy. They will never be happy.

"The internet-culture-leaning biases of some of those involved with the repo might potentially add to that conundrum." Nope, it doesn't. There is no point to argue, and that is the trap. This is what keeps talented people from contributing their time to an open-source project for free.

You are playing into their hands. Create a new discussion if you want to discuss legal dumpster diving. This discussion is about the letter "N" and their demand for answers. You are making that tangent because it forces people to deconstruct everything within their framework of thought. It was a bait you took, and you wasted your time thinking about it. We must now debate whether this is true, and so on, until we have exhausted all possibilities. That is the game, don't play it.

[econundrum]

I think that's a total logical nonsequitor. You're saying because people want to know what two ambiguously named categories are in the settings of the add random Artists feature that they are awful people who will never be happy no matter what you do so don't answer them.

That makes no sense it seems a perfectly simple question that should be easy to answer with minimal effort.

Explain to me what good a setting is if it's not clear what it does.

[AnonymousCervine]

@verywiseman2

I heartily disagree with your premise. In an open source setting, the discussion of whether (and which) issues of morality to care about is completely valid—totally-subjective to whomever is involved—as are any other philosophical discussions, or indeed avoidance thereof. There is no overriding imperative, people can care about what they want and/or decide what they want as a group, or groups, in a semi-democratic, semi-anarchic fashion—that is the very point. The hope of open source is then that that all those myriad efforts trend towards good things, encompassing the full complexity that comes with different people having different ideas of "good things".

(...Mind, again, this project isn't open source, legally, as I was just discussing. It clearly was intended to be, and is de-facto, but is not de-jure; that seemed to me to be quite relevant to the OP's question of whether people should walk away from this repo with their feet: My answer was "I think rationally, yes, but for a different reason," even as I continue to work in this repo personally, as I believe it is the nonetheless the most useful tool for hobbyists and amateurs at the present time—because that's something I choose to subjectively value.)

[IceChes]

To be fair AI in general is a legal dumpster fire.

[AnonymousCervine]

@IceChes I won't disagree ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Blockmaestro]

This guy is afraid of free speech, and therefore has the mind of a child.He also demands an explanation from complete strangers. What kind of retard is this?

[f-rank]

This guy is afraid of free speech, and therefore has the mind of a child.He also demands an explanation from complete strangers. What kind of retard is this?

Seems like a woketard, let's watch how a literal js code monkey gets beat to the curve my miscalculating the lack of social pressure he does not have. These people are hilarious in their midwit little protected sphere. They shouldn't be aloud out of it though, the spectacle they produce by now, is very predictable, so it nosedives into irrelevance the moment you see how their cloned attitudes play out. This person isn't the least interested in racism or the desperate added update of CP to try and revert how bad this charade played out for him, he want's internet imaginary points. Have you tried le reddit kid ? Probably better for you.

[acheong08]

Can this discussion be locked? It's not very constructive (both the discussion itself and the comments)

[ClashSAN]

locking drama post now - 100% on me.

[AnonymousCervine]

As an aside, while I understand the reasons, it's somehow still fascinating how childish and bilious the discussion is in this repository compared to what I'm used to seeing.

The way the OP phrased things was provocative (though that may be unavoidable given the subject matter); the responses are the freshest of hot internet garbage.

I know some of my esteemed company here probably actually is 13 or some-such wherein this manner of discussion is the height of social eloquence—but as for the rest of y'all...