Stable Diffusion

I recently viewed an article on PetaPixel that contained a portfolio of unreal landscapes created by photographer Aurel Manea.  Unreal in the sense that these landscapes, so beautifully depicted, do not actually exist anywhere other than in the photographer's imagination but were instead created through the use of an AI app, still in the beta testing stage, named Stable Diffusion.  The software is only one of several apps offered by Stability AI, an open source enterprise founded by one Emad Mostaque.  In creating landscapes from verbal descriptions this app draws upon Stability AI's LAION 5B, a 250 TB database of 5.6 billion images scraped from the internet.  In some respects it is similar to the better known DALL-E 2 but differs in that, being open source, the imaginary works belong to the artists who created them rather than to a research company that owns the app.

Since the entire point of this blog is to discuss the impact of AI on the creative arts, particularly photography, I may very well apply to become a beta tester of Stability Diffusion.  If I do so and am accepted I will report here on my progress with illustrations showing exactly what I have managed to create.