The Checkpoint #16 – The Stable Diffusion edition

Future Artefacts (Stable Diffusion)

What's new

Whew! It's been a busy few weeks. Days after the last newsletter, Stability AI fully open sourced their Stable Diffusion model, launching a Cambrian explosion of new Colab notebooks, apps, services and controversy. It's kind of overwhelming keeping track of it all, but here's some highlights:

Deforum Stable Diffusion v0.4 – Big update to my favourite SD notebook, now with 3D animation. Join the Deforum community Discord here.

Stable Diffusion Web UI – Friendly web-based UI to SD, much easier than working with the command line. Can be run locally or with Google Colab.

Local Stable Diffusion – Still can't quite get my head around the fact that SD runs happily on my MacBook Air, especially considering I need an A100 on Colab for VQGAN to work properly. Takes some setting up but has loads of extra features including a chatbot interface and a basic web UI.

DiffusionBee – Mac App that packages the whole thing up into an easy to use GUI app. Very barebones and doesn't cover all the options, but is the easiest way to get started running it yourself.

Stable Diffusion Outpainting – Outpaint with SD on an infinite canvas. Github, Colab. Bit glitchy on Colab but it's an interesting proof-of-concept.

Stable Diffusion Image Variations – Justin Pinkney (@Buntworthy) made a fantastic SD fork that can create image variations. I threw together a horribly basic Colab notebook. Needs a V100.

DreamStudio – Stability AI's commercial competitor to MidJourney and Dall-e 2. Easy to use and rapidly getting new features.

Have I been trained – A tool for artists to see if they're in the LAION-5B dataset (and potentially opt out), but also useful for researching prompts.

Artist interviews

I've started series of interviews with AI artists to discover how they got into AI art, what they're working on, their process and much more. Here are the latest pieces:

Please tell me a bit about your background, especially how you went from design to data visualisation and academic research. That’s quite a change.

Please tell me a bit about yourself – what’s your background and what do you do when you’re not making AI art?

Since the full release of Stable Diffusion in late August there’s been an explosion of Stable Diffusion implementations, from Dream Studio, the official web app, to countless Colab notebooks each with unique features. It’s even possible to install and run it locally with the right hardware.

Thanks for reading!

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