AI Lineup
Stable Diffusion
by Stability AI
A downloadable image-model family that can run on your own machine, with free community licensing for most individuals and small organizations.
Free + PaidimageOpen Source
Last checked: 28 September 2026
The details
- What it does
- Generates and edits images from text or images. Current Stable Diffusion 3.5 models can be self-hosted, used through Stability AI's API, or accessed in web applications.
- Cost
- Free Community License for individuals and organizations under $1M in annual revenue · Paid enterprise licensing above that threshold and paid hosted/API options.
- Open Source?
- Downloadable/open-weight models under Stability AI's Community License; use is subject to that license rather than unrestricted public-domain terms.
- 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.
From the Unspun Blog
- You don't need Apple's new 'AI Mac' to use AIApple's new Mac mini and Mac Studio are built for local AI. If you use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini in a browser, you do not need one.
- Google now lets you hide its visible AI watermark. The invisible mark staysGoogle now lets Gemini users hide the visible AI watermark. SynthID and Content Credentials remain, so a clean image is not proof a person made it.
- Google Will Now Label Some Ads as "Made With AI." What That Label Actually Means.Google's started labelling ads that were made with AI — which is handy, but only some are checked automatically.
- Meta's New Image Tool Can Use Your Public Instagram Photos. Here's How to Turn That Off.Meta brought out an AI image tool that can use photos from public Instagram accounts without telling you — but you can switch it off in your settings in about thirty seconds
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