Midjourney is still competitive, but mostly because its easier to use.
Dalle2 will get you laughed out of the room in any ai art discussion.
There are a handful of ML art subs that have pretty amazing stuff daily. Especially the NSFW ones, which if you've studied any history of media VHS/DVD/Blu-ray/the internet, porn is a major innovation driver because humans are thirsty creatures.
FWIW, the NSFW ones are unstable_diffusion, sdforall, sdnsfw, aipornhub
Hehe, yeah. I'm personally waiting for a model that is good at nonhuman stuff. Not just furries... but the focus seems to be on human content for now.
Atm someone has to model, rig, texture, animate etc. Hopefully shortly we can just connect a bunch of systems together to generate video right from a prompt.
Useful for non-porn stuff as well, but the OP is right; lots of innovation occurs when humans are horny (porn) or angry (war).
Edit: typo and clarity.
Honestly the "This happened in the last week" is more information than anybody can fully wrap their heads around, so you just have to surf the headlines and dig into the few things that interest you.
Some bootstrapping accounts might be @rosstaylor90, @rasbt, @karpathy, @ID_AA_Carmack, @DrJimFan, @YiTayML, @JeffDean, @dustinvtran, @tunguz, @fchollet, @ylecun, @miramurati, @nonmayorpete, @pmarca, @sama.
These are definitely not an authoritative list - just some of the AI names I follow - but, honestly - if any relevant news breaks - your timeline picks it up within minutes - so you just need a good random sample. Your interests will diverge and you'll pick up your own follows pretty quickly.
Your 401k wouldn't need 40 years to build a comfortable retirement, only 4 weeks.
We may drown in oceans of audio, video, novels, poems, films, porn, blue prints, chemical formulas, etc. dreamed up by AI, but to realize these designs, blueprints, formulas, drugs, etc. ("production") we need to actually resource the materials, and have the necessary energy to make it happen.
It will not be AI that catapults humanity. It can definitely mutate human society (for +/-) but it will not (and can not) result in any utopian outcomes, alone. But something like cold fusion, if it actually becomes a practical matter, would result in productivity that would dwarf anything that came before (modulo material resource requirements).
If this is true you can pretty much say goodbye to the concept of money. The inflation this brings about will be legendary
What the?
*googles multi-controlnet"
Wow. These diffusion models are like weeping angels. You really can't take your eyes off of them for long.
I used both again recently and the difference was very clear, midjourney is leaps and bounds above anything else.
Sure, stable diffusion has more control over the output, but the images are usually average at best, were as Midjourney is pretty stunning almost always.
Now, if you happen to find or make a SD model that’s exactly what you’re looking for you’re in luck. I have no interest in it but it seems like all of the anime models work pretty well.
You obviously have a ton more control in SD, especially now with ControlNet. But if you want to see the Ninja Turtles surfing on Titan in the style of Rembrandt or something Midjourney will probably kick out something pretty good. Stable Diffusion won’t.
They recently created a full 7-minute anime using Stable Diffusion with their own models and their existing video production gear, I'll post the links and let the results speak for themselves
The actual 7-minute anime piece produced using SD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y
Behind the scenes: "Did we change anime forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9LX9HSQkWo "VFX reveal before and after" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljBSmQdL_Ow
Each still image is still not that impressive. Good for them using the tech in a clever way but i don't find this that relevant.
the benefits of such fine grained control aren't a trick. it's why they were able to scrap together frames that don't jump all over the place (mostly).
the other benefit of such a broadly hacked upon model is that it grows in leaps and bounds.
All due respect to mid journey, but the stable diffusion hype is not just hype.
I still don't like the look of most of the Stable diffusion images, they just look slightly off/amateurish to me, where as midjourney produces images that make you go 'wow'
If you wanted to use these tools, midjourney would be my go too, with stable diffusion a backup for when some of the additional features were needed, perhaps inpanting on a midjourney image and using controlnet if needed but if you just want a pure image, midjourney is what you want.
Controlnet is the big new thing, it is on a different level from earlier img2img.
In Midjourney you get fantastic results just by using their discord and a text prompt.
To get some similar results in Stable Diffusion you need to set it up, download the models, understand how the various moving parts work together, fiddle with the parameters, donwload specific models out of the hundreds (thousands?) available, iterate, iterate, iterate...
While with SD there can be multiple solutions for a single problem, but yeah, you have to develop your own workflow (which will inevitably break with new updates)
But it's this kind of stuff that keeps me engaged. SD is truly a godsend to masochistic hacker types.
Beyond that, being able to go to sleep with my computer doing a massive batch job state space exploration and wake up with a bunch of cool stuff to look at gives me Christmas vibes daily.
Even with all the different models that you can load in stable diffusion MJ is 1000 times better at natural language parsing and understanding, and requires significantly less prompt crafting to be able to get aesthetically pleasing results.
Having used automatic1111 heavily with an RTX 2070, the only area I'll concede SD can do a better job is in closeup Headshots and character generation. MJ blows SD out of the water where complex prompts involving nuanced actions are concerned.
Once midjourney adds controlnet and inpainting to their website that's pretty much game over.
afterwards its $10, $30, $60 per month
here are two examples on my insta account:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Co9O0P6Aga_/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CoXOnBuMMpL/
For your average user, DallE is easy, MJ is fairly disorienting, and SD requires a technical background. I agree with you completely no one serious is doing art with DallE.
I would have said same as you until I tried integrating SD vs. DallE APIs, I desparately want SD because it’s easily 1/10th the cost, but it misses the point much more often. Probably gonna ship it anyway :X
You don't need a technical background at all really. We've also got something cooking that does prompt tuning in the background so there's less prompting needed from the user.
We also have a discord: https://discord.gg/dXJtarPsCm
The former is a wasteland, the latter is more popular than r/art (despite having 1% of subscribers, it has more active users at any given moment)
If you want something ready to use for a newbee, midjourney v4 crushes DALLE2 on both prompt comprehension and the images look far more beautiful.
If you are already into art, then StableDiffusion has a massive ecosystem of alternate stylized models (many which look incredible) and LORA plugins for any concept the base model doesn't understand.
DALLE2 is just a prototype that was abandoned by OpenAI, their main business is GPTs, DALLE was just a side hustle.
“Artistically pleasing” is often what people ask for.
> with the downside of it being locked away and somewhat expensive.
Those are enormous downsides. Even if DALL-E was better in some broadly relevant ways in the base model, SD’s free (gratis, at least) availability means the SD ecosystem has finetuned models (whether checkpoints or ancillary things like TIs, hypernetworks, LORAs, etc.) adapted to... lots of different purposes, and you can mix and match these to create your own models for your own specific purposes.
A web interface backed by strictly the base SD model (of any version) might lose to the same over DALL-E for uses where the set of tools in the SD ecosystem do not.
That being said, for a business use cases, where I want to give it a simple prompt and have a high chance of getting a good usable result, it’s not clear to me that stable diffusion is there yet. Many of the most exciting SD community results seem to be in anime and porn, which can be a bit hard to follow. I guess the use cases that I’m excited about are things like logo generators, blog post image generators, product image thumbnail generators for e-commerce, industrial design, etc.
But please prove me wrong! I’m excited for SD to be the state of the art, it’s definitely better in the long term that’s it’s so accessible. I‘m sure a good guide or blog post about what’s new in stable diffusion outside of anime generation would be an interesting read.
and claiming AI art is art would get you laughed out of any art discussion.
personally I think AI art is really cool, but to discount what Dalle 2 did for AI art is unfair.
So, the field is so immature than things change completely every few months?