Is the latest Midjourney now considered better than Stable Diffusion? If so, will Stable Diffusion catch up? I strongly prefer the open source nature and ability to run locally of Stable Diffusion.
The base tech and models straight from Stability AI give pretty crap results if you just plainly describe a scene.
MJ in contrast provides a great results out of the box. Say anything, get beautiful picture of something. From there you need to figure out specifically what you actually want.
However, if you really want to iterate on just specific details of a scene with a specific layout, with specific characters in specific poses, with specific style elements, MJ is too chaotic to control at that fine detail. So to is SD out of the box. But, if you take the time to learn how to install and use ControlNet, highly specialized models/LORA/textual inversions from wildly varying sources, in-painting, latent upscaling, hook up Photoshop/Krita/Blender integrations, ect, ect… you can eventually get very precise control of SD’s results. And, then new better tech releases next week! :D
Its better in terms of having a no-user-configuration service available that gets you from zero to decent results with nothing more than prompting.
SD is better in available specialized customized models (finetuned checkpoints and the various kinds of mix-and-match auxiliary models and embeddings that can be used with them), not having banned topics because it is self-hostable, available tooling and UIs that expose tuning parameters and incorporate support for integrating techniques like guided generation with various types of ControlNet models, animation, inpainting, outpainting, prompting-by-region, etc., with image generation.
Stable Diffusion's advantage is in the huge amount of open source activity around it. Most recently that resulted in ControlNet, which is far more powerful than anything Midjourney can currently do - if you know how to use it.
Both StabilityAI and the open source community are working on improvements to Stable Diffusion.
Keep in mind StabilityAI is also pursuing LLMs and the host of other model types, whereas text to image is Midjourney's single core competency and value prop. Midjourney is very focused on staying ahead.
edit: I wanted to add that the extensive training costs can be prohibitive for the OSS community to fully participate. Coordination via groups such as LAION can help, but gone are the days of individual OSS participants contributing directly to core foundational model training.
Ambreen Butt
Jan Cox
Constance Gordon-Cumming
Dai Xi
Jessie Alexandra Dick
Dong Qichang
Dong Yuan
Willy Finch
Constance Gordon-Cumming
Spencer Gore
Ernő Grünbaum
Guo Xi
Elena Guro
Adolf Hitler
Prince Hoare
William Hoare
Fanny McIan
Willy Bo Richardson
Shang Xi
Wang Duo
Wang E
Wang Fu
Wang Guxiang
Wang Hui
Wang Jian
Wang Lü
Wang Meng
Wang Mian
Wang Shimin
Wang Shishen
Victor Wang
Wang Wei
Wang Wu
Wang Ximeng
Wang Yi
Wang Yuan
Wang Yuanqi
Wang Zhenpeng
Wang Zhongyu
Xi Gang
Xie Shichen
Xu Xi
I have this list because I recently made a site[1] that displays the 4 images from a prompt of "Lotus, in the style of <paintername> <birth-death dates> [nation of origin]" for every painter listed on wikipedia's "List of painters" -- except for those in the above list.
The fact that they banned both Xi and Jinping separately to prevent Xi Jinping was surprising to me. Twice as banned as Adolf Hitler.
[1] https://lotuslotuslotus.com - small chance you get an NSFW image if you hit upon Fernando Botero or John Armstrong, perhaps there's more.
Nope, that doesn't stop models from being trained on your art. It makes it somewhat more difficult for people to prompt specifically for your style, but your art still influences output, and there may be other ways (e.g., titles of specific works) to deliberately and specifically evoke it in particular.
Anyway, I suspect with more competition many of the restrictions on sites like Midjourney will eventually be removed.
I already had a discord bot I wrote by hand before for downloading the images.
I thought of the project in the morning while my kid was getting ready for school and had it running jobs before we were out the door, worked a little before I left for work, and and a little more after work, and it was done before dinner time.
ChatGPT is incredible.
Maybe that just means banning images that are meant to fool people, and obvious satire would be ok, but they might be ok erring on the side of caution.
(Nothing in the talk was this explicit, but this was my read of the subtext)
ControlNet for Stable Diffusion may be an exception to this.
Stable Diffusion does more things though, like in-painting where you can erase part of an image and then have it recreated. I've seen videos of people doing impressive things with in-painting and extensive regeneration of each portion of an image until it's just right. Seems like a ton of work though. Still I've had some fun using it to modify images or extend images.
The main difference with Stable Diffusion is that you can fine tune with your own dataset. There's img2img, and a bunch of other tools. But the base model it's really worse than competitors right now.
I started testing out the official Stable diffusion API and it already gives you way more control than the Dall-e API and seems to produce less horrifying images that are better quality but I feel like Dall-e understands the prompts better. 7/10
I would love to try mid journey but I uninstalled discord years ago and have no plans to ever reinstall it ever again. So I’ll wait for the API access if they ever do it. 0/10 (only for being discord only)
I'd be happy to be corrected if anyone knows the details on this in SD.