Offline AI Image Generation

On January 5, 2021, OpenAl revealed DALL-E. Frankly, it blew everyone's minds. DALL-E was a modified version of GPT-3. GPT, as you might know, is a large language model (LLM), and it generates text.

- Sahil Malik

But DALL-E took an input prompt and generated an image out of it. No, not searched for images across the internet, but generated a brand-new image on the fly. The demand was great everyone had to try it. There was a wait list. It took a while to generate an image and the images weren't that great, to be honest. Fast-forward barely three years later, and you have many such text-to-image models. DALL-E has undergone a few versions already.

And now there's Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Artbreeder, Deep Dream Generator, Prisma, Craiyon, starryAI, and many more. The images have gotten so good that they're frequently indistinguishable from real images. This has created some strange problems; the phrase "seeing is believing" is no longer true.

In fact, these models have gotten so good and so accessible that you can run them offline, on a commercial offthe-shelf computer. I'm writing this article on a shiny new M4 Max, and I've tested the code on an M1 Max. It's quite realistic to generate images using text prompts with commonly available models on your laptop. By the end of this article, you'll be able to do so on your machine as well.

Pardon me, but I can barely contain my excitement. Can you imagine what this means? My thoughts turn to reality on-the-fly and I'll be the best meme maker in town. All right, more than just that. When building presentations, I could just fire up my local AI model, type in a text prompt, and have it generate a nice image for me. Why doesn't PowerPoint have such a feature? Maybe it doesif not, I'm sure that, at some point, it will.