Are you using the right AI to create your SFF art?
The Midjourney AI became insanely popular in no time. Photographers, painters, tech geeks, authors, roleplayers, you name it, flocked to this and other text-to-image AIs, and still do.
Showing the world that the age of AI art has now arrived. While you're having a blast creating fun stuff with Midjourney, DALL·E 2, or whatever AI you are using, are you sure you've picked the right one? Have you heard about Stability AI? Their DreamStudio (formerly known as Stable Diffusion, which has been in a Discord beta release for some time) now has its own website and is a cheaper alternative.
Why is Stable Diffusion, which is made by Stability AI, disrupting things precisely?
One day, not so long ago from the back of the field, the DreamStudio AI (known as Stable Diffusion back then) sprinted ahead and joined the group at the head of the AI race. And now, it’s turning the whole AI art scene on its head. Not only is DreamStudio good, faster than most AIs, easiere to use, it's also cheaper to use than the competition. And let's not stop there soon it will be free and open source giving you the option to install it on your own computer.
DreamStudio is easy to use but hard to master (like most really fun things in life.) To begin, just write a brief description of your idea and click on the Dream button. The AI does the rest, creating the image within seconds or dreaming them up, if you like. You’ll quickly learn what works and what doesn’t by messing around with the sliders.
So how do I get access to Stable Diffusion?
"AI by the people, for the people." While the competition like Midjourney costs $30 for a somewhat decent monthly subscription, AIs like Google’s Deep Dream and DALL·E 2 are even more expensive.
Compared to DALL·E 2 DreamStudio costs roughly a third (if you make an image of the same quality, but it's complicated as DreamStudio has a lot more features that can potentially make each image cost more if they are of a higher quality. Still, as its interface is super easy to work with and as it will eventually become free to use, that puts it just ahead of the competition. Also, many of the AIs are harder to get access to. For instance, I’ve been waiting since April to get access to DALL·E 2. And few AIs are open source. It is ironic if you know that the Elon Musk-affiliated company Open AI that created DALL·E 2 is not using open source (perhaps a name change is in order?)
I want to use it too! Please find the sign-up page for DreamStudio below. Note that it’s still in beta, so you’ll have to wait till they give you access. It went a lot quicker to get access for me than with the other AIs and hopefully you will have the same experience (fun fact: the word diffusion refers to one of the biggest developments in machine learning in recent years. Many of the popular AIs use diffusion models to generate images.) Sign-up for the DreamStudio Beta II https://beta.dreamstudio.ai
The future Once Stability AI is ready, they will give you access to install and use their AI software on your own private computers. You can even change the code, making it better, or different, or, if you’re that sort of person, remove any safeguards against the nastier things the AI can create (yes, any taboo image you can think of is up for grabs.) If you think open source is some old-fashioned hippy wannabe crap, or that nobody is really going to use this, you’d be wrong. Yesterday (at the time of writing) one of the top players in the AI field announced they are actively going to use the same AI code (DreamStudio / Stable Diffusion) in their Artbreeder AI.
Note that it’s still in beta, so you’ll have to wait till they give you access. It went a lot quicker to get access for me than with the other AIs and hopefully you will have the same experience (fun fact: the word diffusion refers to one of the biggest developments in machine learning in recent years. Many of the popular AIs use diffusion models to generate images.)