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How to Generate Stunning Art on Your Laptop using AI

How to use Stable Diffusion to create realistic images from a description in natural language, without a GPU.

Dimitris Poulopoulos
Towards Data Science
7 min readSep 22, 2022

A robot with a painter's hat painting a picture of a mountain on a white canvas. Digital art. — Image generated by Stable Diffusion

As a kid, I always admired people who could draw whatever came to mind. I could watch them for hours as they would give shape to seemingly arbitrary lines on paper. Unfortunately, I was not blessed with that gift.

Time went by, and today AI can help me materialize the ideas I have in my head. It’s not the same thing, and the process is not even remotely as satisfying. But it’s a way I can express my thoughts on paper.

I was excited when OpenAI granted me access to the DALL·E 2 private beta program. However, the downside was the limitations of what I could do with it, how many times I could use it, the price tag, and the idea that I don’t control the software in any way.

Then, Stable Diffusion came to the party. Much like DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion is an open-source AI system that creates realistic images and art from a description in natural language. It combines concepts, attributes, and styles to create unique photos or device variations of existing pictures. And the good news is that you can run it on your laptop today.

Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Dimitris Poulopoulos
Dimitris Poulopoulos

Written by Dimitris Poulopoulos

Machine Learning Engineer. I talk about AI, MLOps, and Python programming. More about me: www.dimpo.me

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?

interesting, I have tried stable diffusion on my computer, now it exists also a version where you install your GUI instead of using the command line