🧭 AI Lineup
Stable Diffusion
by Stability AI
The open image generator that runs on your own machine. Free, private, and endlessly customisable, if you're willing to tinker.
FreeimageOpen Source
The details
- What it does
- Generates images from text, and can run entirely on your own computer. Free and open, with a large community of custom add-ons.
- Cost
- Free — open and downloadable.
- Open Source?
- Yes — free to download and run
- Input / Output
- TextImages in · Images out
Best for
- Private, offline image generation
- Custom styles and control
- Tinkerers and creators
Kevin’s take
“Stable Diffusion is the open, free image generator — the one you can run on your own computer, with no subscription and nothing sent to a company's server. That openness made it the foundation of a huge community of custom styles and tools. The trade-off is fiddliness: it asks more of you than the polished paid options. Great if privacy and control matter to you.”
— Kevin, formerly of IT Support
Related reading
From the AI Glossary
- DeepfakeA fake image, video, or audio clip made by AI to convincingly show a real person saying or doing something they never did. The technology has improved fast, and the best examples are hard to spot. Not all of it is malicious. Some is used for film and satire. But the same tools can be used to deceive, and that's the part worth paying attention to.
- Diffusion ModelThe kind of AI behind most image generators. It learns by taking real images, adding visual static until they're pure noise, then learning to reverse the process. To make a new picture, it starts from random noise and gradually cleans it into an image that matches your description. Tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion work this way. It sounds backwards, and in a sense it is, but it produces remarkable results.
- LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)An efficient way to adapt an existing AI model to a specific style or task without retraining the whole thing. Instead of rebuilding a model from scratch, LoRA adds a small, lightweight layer of adjustments on top. It's popular in image generation, where people use it to teach a model a particular character, art style, or look, cheaply and quickly. A small file does what would otherwise take enormous resources.
- Open SourceSoftware whose underlying code is made freely available for anyone to inspect, use, and modify. The idea predates AI by decades and powers much of the internet. In AI the label is used loosely, and often a bit generously: some models share everything, others share only parts and still claim it. Genuinely open AI lets people see how a tool works and run it themselves, rather than taking a company's word for it.
- Open WeightsA model whose trained internals, the weights, have been released publicly, so anyone can download and run it themselves. Meta's Llama models are a well-known example. It's not quite the same as fully open source, because the recipe and data used to build the model aren't always shared. But open weights let people run capable AI on their own machines, without sending anything to a company's servers.
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