Whether you like them or not, Artificial Intelligence (AI) image generators have exploded in popularity this year and the technology shows no signs of stopping. So if you're feeling confused about which AI Image generator you should use in 2022, this is a complete guide to the best options out there. A product of the Elon Musk co-founded research lab OpenAI, DALL-E 2, which we'll refer to as simply DALL-E, is the software most people can name when you ask them about AI text-to-image generators. When it launched in April, DALL-E stunned social media with its ability to turn a brief description into a photo-realistic image. For the few people with privileged access to the closed-off tool, DALL-E was so exceptional that it almost felt like magic -- whether that involved generating pictures of "a raccoon astronaut with the cosmos reflecting on the glass of his helmet" or "teddy bears shopping for groceries in Ancient Egypt," all from a simple text prompt.

Stable Diffusion has been a buzzword in the last months after it was publicly unveiled by its developer Stability AI on August 22, 2022. Not only Stable Diffusion generates complex artistic images based on text prompts, but it's also an open source image synthesis AI model available to everyone. Its free accessibility makes it very different from its predecessors. In this post, we explain how it works, what prospects it opens, and share tips on how you can use it. The best way to introduce Stable Diffusion is to show you what it can do. Let's start with the free demo version available on Hugging Face.

DALL-E 2, OpenAI's powerful text-to-image AI system, can create photos in the style of cartoonists, 19th century daguerreotypists, stop-motion animators and more. But it has an important, artificial limitation: a filter that prevents it from creating images depicting public figures and content deemed too toxic. Now an open source alternative to DALL-E 2 is on the cusp of being released, and it'll have no such filter. London- and Los Altos-based startup Stability AI this week announced the release of a DALL-E 2-like system, Stable Diffusion, to just over a thousand researchers ahead of a public launch in the coming weeks. A collaboration between Stability AI, media creation company RunwayML, Heidelberg University researchers and the research groups EleutherAI and LAION, Stable Diffusion is designed to run on most high-end consumer hardware, generating 512 512-pixel images in just a few seconds given any text prompt. "Stable Diffusion will allow both researchers and soon the public to run this under a range of conditions, democratizing image generation," Stability AI CEO and founder Emad Mostaque wrote in a blog post.

Let's begin with the objective part of the story. This section is slightly technical (although not difficult), so feel free to skim through it (still worth reading if you plan to use the model). Stable Diffusion 2 is the generic name of an entire family of models that stem from a common baseline: Stable Diffusion 2.0-base (SD 2.0-base) a raw text-to-image model. The baseline model is trained on an aesthetic subset of the open dataset LAION-5B (keep this in mind, it will be important later) and generates 512x512 images. On top of SD 2.0-base, Stability.ai

We live in exciting times where every week, we have announcements on cutting-edge technology. A few months ago, OpenAI dropped state of the art text-to-image model DALL·E 2. Only a few people got early access to experience a new AI system that can create realistic images from a description using natural language. It is still closed to the public. A few weeks later, Stability AI launched the open-source version of DALLE2 called the Stable Diffusion model. This launch has changed everything. As people all over the internet were posting prompt results and getting amazed by realistic art.