The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the time.
People could now generate images from text on their own hardware!
More importantly, developers could mess around with the guts of what was going on.
The resulting explosion in innovation is still going on today. Most recently, ControlNet appears to have leapt Stable Diffusion ahead of Midjourney and DALL-E in terms of its capabilities.
It feels to me like that Stable Diffusion moment back in August kick-started the entire new wave of interest in generative AI—which was then pushed into over-drive by the release of ChatGPT at the end of November. Read More
Tag Archives: Image Recognition
AI re-creates what people see by reading their brain scans
A new artificial intelligence system can reconstruct images a person saw based on their brain activity
As neuroscientists struggle to demystify how the human brain converts what our eyes see into mental images, artificial intelligence (AI) has been getting better at mimicking that feat. A recent study, scheduled to be presented at an upcoming computer vision conference, demonstrates that AI can read brain scans and re-create largely realistic versions of images a person has seen. As this technology develops, researchers say, it could have numerous applications, from exploring how various animal species perceive the world to perhaps one day recording human dreams and aiding communication in people with paralysis.
Many labs have used AI to read brain scans and re-create images a subject has recently seen, such as human faces and photos of landscapes. The new study marks the first time an AI algorithm called Stable Diffusion, developed by a German group and publicly released in 2022, has been used to do this. Read More
I Made an AI Clone of Myself
I spent a day recording videos in front of a green screen and reading all types of scripts to create a digital clone of myself that can say anything I want her to using a platform called Synthesia.
In November, a company called Synthesia emailed Motherboard and offered “an exclusive date with your AI twin.”
“Hello, ever thought about creating your own digital twin? You’ve been invited to Synthesia’s New York studio to build your own virtual avatar, like me!” an AI clone of Synthesia spokesperson Laura Morelli said in a video embedded in the email. “Don’t miss out on learning more about the new sexy sector. Lock in your one-hour slot now to build your own avatar with Synthesia. Hurry now because spots are limited and filling up fast.” Read More
The AI photo app trend has already fizzled, new data shows
Is the AI photo app trend already over? Over the past several months, AI-powered photo apps have been going viral on the App Store as consumers explored AI powered–experiences like Lensa AI’s “magic avatars” feature and other apps promising to turn text into images using AI tech. But new data from app intelligence firm Apptopia indicates consumer interest in AI photo apps has fallen as quickly as it rose.
The firm analyzed top AI photo apps worldwide, tracking both their download growth and in-app consumer spending.
In its analysis shared with TechCrunch, Apptopia examined the leading AI photo app Lensa AI and others, including Voi, Remini, Pixelup, Fotor, Wonder, FacePlay, Aiby, FaceApp, Gradient, Dawn AI, Facetune, Prequel, Voilà AI Artist, New Profile Pic Avatar Maker, and Meitu. (Voi was a later arrival, launching on December 7.)
Apptopia found that this group of AI apps first began to take off around Thanksgiving, then hit their peak in terms of both downloads and in-app purchases around mid-December. Read More
Lexica: The Search Engine for AI-generated Art
Lions and Tigers and Lawsuits, Oh my!
AI Art Generators Hit With Copyright Suit Over Artists’ Images
A group of artists is taking on AI generators Stability AI Ltd., Midjourney Inc., and DeviantArt Inc. in what would be a first-of-its-kind copyright infringement class action over using copyrighted images to train AI tools.
Sarah Andersen, author of the web comic “Sarah Scribbles,” along with fellow artists Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, sued the AI companies in a purported class action that claims they downloaded and used billions of copyrighted images without obtaining the consent of or compensating any of the artists. Read More
Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content
Getty Images claims Stability AI ‘unlawfully’ scraped millions of images from its site. It’s a significant escalation in the developing legal battles between generative AI firms and content creators.
Getty Images is suing Stability AI, creators of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, over alleged copyright violation.
In a press statement shared with The Verge, the stock photo company said it believes that Stability AI “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright” to train its software and that Getty Images has “commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London” against the firm. Read More
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
Proving you’re a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online.
Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.
It’s like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators. Read More
An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion
Text-to-image models offer unprecedented freedom to guide creation through natural language. Yet, it is unclear how such freedom can be exercised to generate images of specific unique concepts, modify their appearance, or compose them in new roles and novel scenes. In other words, we ask: how can we use language-guided models to turn our cat into a painting, or imagine a new product based on our favorite toy? Here we present a simple approach that allows such creative freedom. Using only 3-5 images of a user-provided concept, like an object or a style, we learn to represent it through new “words” in the embedding space of a frozen text-to-image model. These “words” can be composed into natural language sentences, guiding personalized creation in an intuitive way. Notably, we find evidence that a single word embedding is sufficient for capturing unique and varied concepts. We compare our approach to a wide range of baselines, and demonstrate that it can more faithfully portray the concepts across a range of applications and tasks. Read More
Remaking Old Computer Graphics With AI Image Generation
Can AI Image generation tools make re-imagined, higher-resolution versions of old video game graphics?
Over the last few days, I used AI image generation to reproduce one of my childhood nightmares. I wrestled with Stable Diffusion, Dall-E and Midjourney to see how these commercial AI generation tools can help retell an old visual story – the intro cinematic to an old video game (Nemesis 2 on the MSX). This post describes the process and my experience in using these models/services to retell a story in higher fidelity graphics. Read More
He Used AI to See Today’s Looks of The Famous People From the Past
Brazilian digital artist Hidreley Diao recently started to post somewhat familiar faces on his Instagram. His goal is to imagine what famous historical figures would look like if you ran into them in the grocery store.
He uses FaceApp, Photoshop, Remini, and Gradient to create realistic portraits of those people.
Out of dozens of characters, here are the eleven AI faces that look hyperrealistic. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 