14. Stable Diffusion

A lot’s been said about Stability AI’s free art generatorwhile it was in closed beta, but on Aug. 22, the free image generator finally got a full release, and since then, it’s been one of the more talked about image creators. Stable Diffusion is open source, free, and unfiltered compared to the likes of Dall-E or Google’s (still publicly unavailable) Imagen. Its basic page on Hugging Face is pretty rudimentary, but you can make it much easier to use with some simplefreeware tools, though you’ll have to install Python to get it working. Stable Diffusion relies on a model based on the LAION-5B data set that filters out watermarked images and logos, according to its own page. Based on a report from tech blogger Andy Baio, many of the images are mostly sourced from Pinterest and other photo and art blogs. My attempts at asking it to create its own art without telling it to ape copy one particular artist were largely unsuccessful. It kept offering me black-and-white images without any style or substance. Without asking it to copy a specific artist, it only offers pretty disappointing works compared to what other users have managed to get.

It seems the system is much better at coming up with art when you specifically ask it to do it in the style of a particular artist. This, of course, introduces a host of ethical problems, especially for the living artists people may be emulating, as shown by fantasy artist Greg Rutkowski, who was interviewed by MIT Technology Review and said he was worried about the number of fake AI art bearing his name would eclipse his own visibility.