One of the major advancements in technology over the past couple of years, besides all the interesting products we talk about, has been the speedy popularity of AI. AI has been a thing of dreams of fiction in movies past, but also a reason for fears but surprisingly, it’s also come together to create something quite creative. It’s quite the contrary of what one imagines AI to be. AI is supposed to be robotic, mundane and repetitive but the results are quite impressive. If you’re being scouring the web for memes and funny photos, even artistic ones, with superheroes and game characters and movie stars, you’re bound to have come by images over the past few months that were created with AI.
If the words AI can create art, technical terms like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI sound like mumbo-jumbo to you, we hope to give you a quick introduction to this quickly evolving world of artificial intelligence and its role in text to image generation.
What is it?
The technical term for what we have been talking about is, text-to-image generator using machine learning and AI. What this means in simple words is that, with the right query much like search engine keywords, you can ask a software, or code, or even a web service, to create an image that you can imagine but no one has ever made before. You don’t have to be an artist to do this. These software use models that have been trained using a ton of images and other smart algorithms to understand what words mean, and their context. If you are a developer, you can modify and tweak these models and systems to do more.
What services can I find?
Two of the most popular text-to-image models on the web are OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. There are many others, but few are as popular. Both have made significant progress over the months, which is why the popularity and adoption seems to have skyrocketed this past year or so. Everyone wants to know how to use them, and where. Newer versions with large updates are already on the way.
There are plenty of services offering online services that let you type in a couple of words, to an entire paragraph describing what you want the AI to create. These services may use one of the many models and systems we mentioned earlier. Craiyon which was called DALL-E Mini at one point, is one of the simplest ones that lets you generate art without even having to register for an account. Some of the other services worth trying out are Microsoft’s Designer https://designer.microsoft.com/ and others like starryai.com and creator.nightcafe.studio.
How do I create a piece of art?
We use prompts or keywords to ask the AI to create images for us. These prompts can sound silly but can be detailed to describe exactly what you have in mind – “a chair in the shape of a laptop” or “an apple with stripes” are the most basic kind. The best results come out of prompts that are more descriptive and precise though.
How does one set up these services?
All the services mentioned have setup the text-to-image generation models on their own hardware and servers. They offer a web interface so users can simply access them using a web browser. Some of them are free, while others have limitations, or queues, or require registrations, even subscriptions. The same systems can also be run on your laptop or PC. Some basic know-how of programming, and how to setup packages can help, but it is possible. Stable Diffusion is one of the free and open-source packages, and you can set it up if you wish. You need to install Python which runs the package, and Git, so you can clone the Stable Diffusion repository from Github. You can find detailed instructions at https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion
What hardware do you need?
You can run your own AI generating models on your laptop or PC. A lot of the processing happens with the help of powerful graphics cards. So, if you’re looking to setup one, consider running it on a reasonably modern gaming laptop or PC running one of the newer generations of graphics solutions from AMD and NVIDIA. Slower laptops and PCs will work fine but you may need to wait a lot of time for the images to be rendered.
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