Today I downloaded Stable Diffusion which is an open text-to-image technology from Stability.ai that can render images on your own computer.  You need a heavy duty graphics card but it’s free to use.  The technology is open and many other start-ups are incorporating it into their systems including Midjourney which I have been very impressed with.

It’s early days and some of the installation methods are technically complicated (“step one: install Python programing language…” etc.) but I found a user interface project – Stable Diffusion UI – that has a “1 click” installer for Windows.  It was a little more than one click, but I managed and now I’m rendering away testing it out.

My initial impression is that it’s not as good as Midjourney, not as artistic or flexible.  The resolution is lower, 1024 x 1024 is the largest available in the drop down menu, at least in the GUI that I installed.  I’ve also discovered that it has a tendency to create double headed characters if you use any resolution over 512 x 512.  Apparently the AI was trained at that resolution and if you try something larger it tries to fill the space by duplicating things.  Like I said, it’s early days.

I’m still very impressed though.  I’ve only tried copying and pasting some of my midjourney prompts which were of course optimized for a different system.  I have yet to spend time figuring out all the controls and I’m still getting some interesting images.  They render fast, within a minute or two on my system which has nVidia Titan RTX graphics cards.

More to come…