This week on The Changelog we’re talking about Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and the impact of AI generated art. We invited our good friend Simon Willison on the show today because he wrote a very thorough blog post titled, “Stable Diffusion is a really big deal.”

You may know Simon from his extensive contributions to open source software. Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web framework (which we don’t talk about at all on this show), he’s the creator of Datasette, a multi-tool for exploring and publishing data (which we do talk about on this show)…most of all Simon is a very insightful thinker, which he puts on display here on this episode. We talk from all the angles of this topic, the technical, the innovation, the future and possibilities, the ethical and the moral – we get into it all. The question is, will this era be known as the initial push back to the machine?

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members get a bonus 5 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
Honeycomb – Guess less, know more. When production is running slow, it’s hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? With Honeycomb you get a fast, unified, and clear understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. Join the swarm and try Honeycomb free today at honeycomb.io/changelog

Featuring:

Show Notes:

Simon Willison on Wikipedia
Stable Diffusion is a really big deal
Exploring 12 Million of the 2.3 Billion Images Used to Train Stable Diffusion’s Image Generator
Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion
Stability.ai
Greg Rutkowsk on ArtStation and on Twitter
Stable Diffusion Launch Announcement
Stable Diffusion Public Release
The full text of the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license
Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3
Twitter thread about the ethics of the Stable Diffusion release from Joshua Achiam who works on AI safety at OpenAI
Lexica.art - that really good search engine for 10m+ Stable Diffusion images and prompts
Simon’s Twitter thread about Stable Diffusion - I keep on adding new things to this as they happen, the thread has been running for a few weeks now
4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything - a great post that talks through the process involved in getting good results out of Stable Diffusion using image2image and multiple round-trips through the model
This tweet from Simon has a animated GIF of the Stable Diffusion Discord scrolling by during the 1.5 model preview
Textual Inversion also see this thread on Twitter
This tweet talks about the Stable Diffusion concepts library, using Textual Inversion
This tweet has great examples of Textual Inversion in action
Simon’s Datasette Cloud preview - Check it out and signup
Compressing images with Stable Diffusion
“neuromancer” on Lexica
Online Art Communities Begin Banning AI-Generated Images
The Changelog #296: Burnout, open source, Datasette

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Product-Led Growth Meets Sales - First