Will the Unstable Diffusion team be able to complete their fundraise through alternate means within a year?
40
352
770
resolved Jan 1
Resolved
YES

Unstable Diffusion is that NSFW AI-art derivative of Stable Diffusion that was recently kicked off of Kickstarter:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/21/kickstarter-shut-down-the-campaign-for-ai-porn-group-unstable-diffusion-amid-changing-guidelines/

This market resolves YES if, before 2023 is out, the group has raised at least as much as they initially asked for on their Kickstarter ($25,000), AND they have actually been able to lay their hands on the money. "Lay hands on" includes, but is not limited to, any of the following:

- Is in a bank account

- Is in a crypto wallet the team controls

- Has been in a paypal account (or similar) the team controls

- Is in cash in physical possession of the team

Additionally:

  • If we don't have direct proof of the above, as long as its credibly claimed to be, and I believe it, that counts

  • In any case where a counterparty who COULD freeze the funds (such as a bank or paypal) is holding the funds, the following must hold:

    • The team has made at least 1 significantly sized payment from the account

    • The account has had the funds in it for at least 30 days and has not been frozen

The point is, if they "successfully" fundraise again, but then the money just gets seized, or frozen, or never actually makes its way to them in a form they can actually use, this resolves NO.

If their money gets tied up and frozen, but then is later unfrozen, as long as it remains unfrozen for long enough for them to make a significantly sized payment within the resolution deadline, this resolves YES.

If at any time they spend $25K from the account, this IMMEDIATELY resolves YES. (This includes the case where someone on the team embezzles all the money and runs off with it).

However, if e.g. some thief steals all the money before they can use it, or they take payment in crypto and someone hacks it from them and runs off with it, and that person is not proven to have any connection to the team within the resolution deadline, this resolves NO.

It can resolve YES any time before the end of 2023, but it will only resolve NO if the deadline expires without a YES resolution, or the team officially gives up and publicly disbands ahead of the deadline with no credible reason to believe they will get back together.

(If the team breaks up and reforms under some other configuration that's significantly different, especially if it uses another name and has substantially different membership, this market doesn't care about that.)

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bought Ṁ1,200 of YES

https://discord.com/channels/1010980909568245801/1062394459762999296

From the announcement channel in Unstable Diffusion's official Discord server (this channel is SFW, others may not be):

2023-01-10: "[...] we've raised over $26k so far and we'll release more updates on our site soon"

2023-03-26: "[...] we've tested a bunch of tagging methods and found one that reduced our costs to a managable level. [...] clip interrogation was looking too expensive (around half of the amount raised!) and not high enough quality captions, but we've settled on a new one that should cost only around a few thousand."

2023-04-10: "Recently, we tagged over 100,000 images using the experimental tagging system."

I think the later updates should satisfy the "significantly sized payment" requirement.

predicted YES

@Aaron_ will check this tomorrow!

predicted YES

@LarsDoucet I am unfortunately not able to follow that link, it just leads to an error message

predicted YES

@LarsDoucet Whoops, try the Discord invite link at https://www.unstability.ai/

bought Ṁ25 of NO

Just suspended from patreon now.

I wonder if Manifold itself should provide the ability to do kickstarter-type fundraising, either in mana or with real USD... Maybe we could whip up a prototype for the Unstable Diffusion folks.

predicted NO

@Austin If you do that I will definitely start a market about negative polarization that Manifold will attract by doing so :)

predicted NO

@LarsDoucet Also, just curious what would they (or anyone else) do with Mana?

@LarsDoucet Oh, presumably we'd let such project creators cash out from mana to USD; there's precedent for charities and Destiny https://manifold.markets/destinygg

Generally, I'm in favor of supporting real USD payouts for anything that's shaped like a public good (because then we have reasonable grounds to send money to it from our 501c3)

predicted NO

@Austin I mean you guys do what you want, I'm just warning you to make sure you know what you're getting into before you invite any particular project to be your test case. You could hardly pick a more controversial project to start with than Unstable Diffusion, to be frank.

@LarsDoucet Haha I'm very far on the "welcoming controversy" side of the PR spectrum -- I think Manifold's at the stage where a NYT article about "look at this weird gambling site offering to fund AI pron" would one of the best possible things to happen to us.

Separately, I toyed with a kickstarter-type market before for Manifold Dark Mode: https://manifold.markets/Austin/kickstart-will-the-manifold-communi. Didn't get enough commitments but I really like the concept of crowdfunding of bounties for Manifold features!

@Austin Personally, Manifold deciding to build infrastructure to fund AI pornography would probably make me less likely to buy mana with USD in the future; a more general fundraising platform (not created specifically for this one controversial thing) would be less controversial, but seems pretty far off of what Manifold's goals are. Crowdfunding from the Manifold community to pay Manifold developers might be a promising idea, though!

predicted YES

@a Also, for what it's worth from what we've objectively seen so far, if Manifold were to make itself a payment provider for a project like this, you would immediately become the target of a deplatforming campaign to get your underlying payment infrastructure to boot you (they're currently using stripe, who is being lobbied as we speak), followed by a campaign to knock you off your web host as well. IMHO, there is such a thing as bad publicity. Also completely apart from my personal feelings about Unstable Diffusion, I will say seeing fundraising for such a project here would strike me as very orthogonal to the general vibe and purpose of Manifold and make me personally less interested in using the site because right now it feels very neutrally politically coded and all about making predictions, and I don't need any more high temperature tribal polarization in what's swiftly become my current social media drug of choice.