What's the simplest way to create AI art on your PC? Although Stable Diffusion is often seen as the best way to create AI art on your PC, Fooocus offers a simple setup experience, with rewarding depth for those who wish to dive deeper. Stable Diffusion debuted two years ago as the way to create AI art on your PC. While I've used some of the techniques that David Wolski outlined in his tutorial on using Stable Diffusion, it just feels so complicated to set up. Fooocus (yes, three "o's) offers essentially a one-click setup process in the same vein as something like winget: You tell it what to do, and then Fooocus goes out and does it.

It's hard to miss how much attention AI image generators alone have attracted in recent months. With good reason, because they demonstrate the progress of deep learning models in a vivid and playful way. From chaotic random images generated with neural networks, which Google made accessible to the general public with Deep Dream in 2015, the journey went to almost photo-realistic images of the generators Dall-E 2 by Open AI, Midjourney by Midjian, or DreamStudio by Stable Diffusion. Generators are now available not only in the cloud, but also for your own PC. Provided it has enough power.

Does your PC really need to search for aliens? How about pitching in your resources to help make AI art, instead? A new community effort, Stable Horde, allows you to donate your PC's extra GPU cycles to create AI art and use your donated time to create AI art in just a fraction of the time instead. Stable Horde is a grass-roots effort where you can donate your PC's idle time to help others create fabulous AI art -- or you can use the "horde" of PCs to create your own AI art, too. Stable Horde is similar to both SETI@Home (which went into "hibernation" in 2020) or Folding@Home.

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