Run Stable Diffusion on your own PC
YOU’LL NEED THIS
A GPU and plenty of time to spend downloading
© STABLE DIFFUSION
WHILE MOST OF THE TEXT-AND IMAGE-GENERATING AI MODELS we’ve discussed here run in massive throbbing data centers on racks of GPUs—indeed, Elon Musk purchased 10,000 Nvidia cards in March for an unannounced AI project within Twitter—there is one that can be run on your home PC.
Stable Diffusion is a deep learning text-to-image service that was released in 2022. It uses a diffusion model rather than a large language model, but the concept is broadly similar in that it’s probability based and is trained from images harvested from the wider internet, plus words associated with them, as well as versions of the same images that have been blurred. With this knowledge, Stable Diffusion is able to begin with a frame full of random image noise, and works to de-blur it to ‘reveal’ the image. The final result is based on the model’s training and the prompt it’s provided with.