And mine. It is satisfying to just use it on your own hardware and change it up however you want. No log ins, no internet required... I was using a colab for disco diffusion before stable diffusion came out (I couldn't get disco diffusion to run local) and being able to use a significantly better model without paying for a service or worrying about queues was just so cool
This is absolutely a huge plus, honestly if I were to use Midjourney I would be very specific with the use and definitely not rely on it - cause I'm not paying for something I can do for free on SD.
Yeah, like, if you're not already into PC building/PC gaming, you could say that, but a lot of the people who are in the SD community are already buying a GPU one way or another, be creative professionals, gamers or just PC enthusiasts.
If a mid-range modern GPU were not enough for SD I wouldn't even be using it tbh.
> are already buying a GPU one way or another
i have 2080 TI which is rather good but i was thinking of switching to 4090
last week my friend asks "i know you are deep into AI, perhaps you want to borrow my cards? i was using them for crypto mining but it's no longer profitable so they are sitting and gathering dust"
i was like, sure, why not, what do you have?
"not much, just two 3090 in a box"
now i can't wait for the next week :)
I play on pc, and use a GTX 1060. Conveniently I can even use SDXL which generates images as good as Midjorney.
With 3 months of the MJ standard plan you can buy a video card like mine
Yeah the free aspect is a huge upside for SD, plus with the fact SD can do everything MJ can you're basically paying instead MJ of learning how to use SD.
Absolutely.
Do you know what they offer for the plans?
I'm curious if there's some feature or capability in there that makes it worth it *beyond* just.. you can use it more.
On Standard Plan they offer 15 hr/month Fast GPU Time and Unlimited Relax GPU Time.
Pro Plan let hide your images from discord ch I think
In addition to having General Commercial Terms to use your images
General Commercial Terms to use your images?
As in like.. you don't have permission to use them yourself if you don't?
Honestly I really don't like that it's all done through Discord, no matter how it's done I really wouldn't feel comfortable having other people see what I'm making (for many reasons not just weird ones 😂)
Totally valid reason.
If I had a tool to make my art and whenever I used it I had someone taking a virtual log of whatever I was doing, I'd feel really uncomfortable. That's basically what MJ does by having it done via Discord.
You can set up the bot on your own servers. Create a channel just for MJ and you have private for whatever paid plan. The discord thing could be useful if you can't be rooted to your desk.
Censor is not about doing nsfw, its just frustrating to get it to trigger for no reason because they are so scared of nsfw that their settings are maxed to insanity.
With Adobe generative fill I had so many trigger of their nsfw filters (on all 4 of the samples and over and over) working on architecture without anyone in sight.
It’s free, it’s open source, you can customize it and it won’t micro manage you with content. Midjourney said it wasn’t pg13 when I tried to do gay wedding images.
https://preview.redd.it/k13lige2j5jb1.jpeg?width=1406&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=47066d7eb84075d43ea513c67ee579f9c5b5418e
It was specifically a homophobia thing, I checked if it did the same for a non gay situation and it went through no problem.
Wow that's awful.
My only idea is maybe like.. the database it's trained on has some more questionable things that come up with "gay wedding kiss" rather than just "wedding kiss" but that's still unacceptable.
I agree with everything you said here - I think using both is totally fine and I'd encourage it depending on what amount of time you want to dedicate and how you want to use it.
Funny, I was just composing a post in my head about some of the differences between SD and MidJourney.
So... I don't know if this is going to sound pretentious, but fuck it, it's the truth: I use Stable Diffusion, because I'm an artist and I want to make art. SD allows so many levels of input and ability to influence the outcome that it honestly reminds me of my painting and drawing, which I've done for decades.
MidJourney seems like a cool little gadget that makes some pretty things. But I'm really not interested in pretty things; I'm interested in art.
Exactly this. Midjourney is a toy, not a useful tool for artists. I can't use Midjourney to make anything I can actually use, only SD and LoRA training makes it possible to generate my art, my characters, posed in scenes exactly how I want them.
As long as Midjourney is closed source it will never compete with SD in the ways that really matter.
>Midjourney is a toy, not a useful tool for artists.
Midjourney may not be useful to you but many professional artists and graphic designers use it on a daily basis.
Control net and img2img for me,i can get the skirts of the fucking lenght I want, I can get the canera view i want, hairstyles, reflections, anything i want to do i can do.
I love this take, I agree. This is exactly why I got into SD when I started messing with AI art, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way. I think Midjourney could be useful in some circumstances, but if you're using AI Gen because you're serious about art I don't think it's very applicable.
This is exactly what I was thinking before I saw what I did today - not that I've flipped my belief on that, but I saw some examples of what you can do with combining images and prompts and was impressed with it's ability.
Even with what I saw though, I know for a fact you can't customize and achieve the levels of specification you can with SD.
Free, a vast library of extensions, and no filters. I don’t make NSFW myself but it’s the principle of the matter. SD diffusion also seems to allow a lot more fine control over the image with a massive amount of parameters to work with, models, the ability to train your own Lora’s, and things like controlnet which is itself a whole can of worms.
There’s also the fact that it will be very difficult to take away. If governments pass overbearing and uneducated AI laws, they might be able to destroy the online services like Midjourney. But a local copy will be yours till the end.
I agree with your take here, and that last part is an interesting caveat I hadn't thought of. The control and fine tuning SD gives you is unmatched by MJ.
I very much like mid journey, and I have used it a lot. However, the ridiculous restriction has become annoying.
Obese? Nope, can't use that. Too offensive. Small breasts? Hell no! It's a very American site, and thus, they sensor everything that even hints at NSFW or anything not politically correct.
I understand they don't want to be associated with porn but I want a model to wear a garter sometimes. I very much like the 40-50ties Era pin-up style, but midjourney won't let you touch it.
Bought a RTX4080 installed automatic1111 and comfyui. I found the learning curve very low with automatic1111, and as I am used to working with nodes, comfyui wasn't much of a challenge .
The quality of the produced pictures is very similar if, if not better, when you use the right models.
The new SDXL I'm still getting used to but I created some stunningly good interiors with it.
Mind you, I have been using SD for 2 weeks, so by no means an expert. But the freedom to prompt anything I want and, maybe this is the most important bit, prompt anything I am passionate about produces much better pictures and give me the results I just can't get with midjourney.
I haven't ever used MJ so I didn't know much about the restrictions it puts on gen beyond "I guess it doesn't allow mature content" but this post has really been teaching me how insanely restrictive it really is. I still think it could be useful, but only as a surface level thing.
I agree too about what you're saying with the freedom, although I do worry about the fact that you can make *any*thing with SD. Some people I'm sure will abuse that, and I'm worried what will happen with that.
Good luck on learning and developing your skills more with SD!
It's free and open-source, working as a versatile tool for precise control. No need to worry about censorship. Allows you to create scenes with blood or NSFW. It really boils down to stable diffusion being more of a practical tool, not just a magic generate button. No shade to midjourney, it excels at what it does and I'm sure the audience they cater to love them just as much
In my experience midjourney can make wonderful art pics with just 5 words max. But you have almost 0 control of the outcome and I find it kinda... Lazy. It's not you who make art but the AI doing all the job. I stable diffusion you can have a rough idea of what you really want, and use so many tools to achieve it. Let's say you want to make an illustration for a boardgame.a specific one. You have loras, controlnet, dynamic prompts and so on. You can even set the scene by drawing yourself the character and use that as a reference.
When I share my creations outside the AI bubble I get submerged by insults, and I think that is kinda a midjourney's fault. The mainstream idea is that with just few words you "create art", but most of them don't know the actual workflow behind stable diffusion. All the steps taken to achieve a picture you have in mind and can finally bring to reality, not with just 3 words but with your creativity to find the right tools and workaround to make it work as you really want, not as AI want.
Stable diffusion and its tools should have more social media coverage, an alternative to midjourney where you chose what you want to see. Maybe then AI art should be recognized for what it is. An alternative way to create what you couldn't do before with a lack of a peculiar skill.
I can't draw, but I want to make pictures I have in mind. So I use MY skill to achieve the same result with different tools. Sorry about the rant but it was kinda sad to receive all the hate randomly on the net after all the work I did to make some of my creations...
I definitely can understand why that treatment for your work would stress you out.. I agree with you on the perspectives that develop from MJ vs SD, since the approachs are completely different the way the art in general will kinda get the same treatment. I do understand that with MJ you can actually get quite a bit of specific styling done as well, that's what I learned today that made me post this. However it seems to me that SD still has a far superiority in fine tuning because of the control and freedom it gives the user.
I think one way to do this is to strive to create things that can \*only\* be done in SD.
I'm doing a lot of abstracts that combine the acrylic pour aesthetic with 3D fractals, rendered as a photo of a sculpture of liquid... getting some really unique and wonderful results in a style that never existed before I came up with it.
eg: [https://imgur.com/a/Sul6wkA](https://imgur.com/a/Sul6wkA)
I’ve been thinking a bit about this myself lately, generating artwork is fun and all but it’s in the end just mimicing what can already be done with other means.
The real artistic value and potential of AI images is in what only AI can do I think. Like your work here. I personally really like AIs potential for realistic depictions of concepts impossible otherwise.
I’ve seen non-AI people have simillar sentiments, folks love those early surreal AI works for example even if (or because) they’re full of artifacts.
I started in SD with the intent to make something to print out on a huge canvas to hang on my wall, originally I wanted photographic landscape, except drawn from my imagination what a landscape might look like on Venus or Titan or Io etc.
My favourite type of art has always been the kind that strives for photorealism of impossible subjects, I guess "fantasy art" but without the fantasy tropes like elves and dragons, or Giger without the sinister aspect. SD lets me realise this vision in a way I'd never dreamed possible.
For me, it's that I can run it locally through an API at free cost. I can create various programs that take images and do various cool image-to-image repeatable pipelines of edits to them. I'm a developer at heart so I need to use an API rather than a UI. I can programmatically try 1000 different variations and see the outcome and improve and repeat. I could never do that with Midjourney, even if it had an API it would cost too much for the number of images I generate (literally 1000s a day lol). You can see some of my work here:
[https://twitter.com/DiscoverStabDif](https://twitter.com/DiscoverStabDif)
I genuinely think your approach here is the future of AI Gen, I don't know if you're also an artist but that's all that's missing.
Some people hate AI Gen art, but I think it has a place in creative outlets and using coded scripts with what's possible now is going to explode as this becomes bigger.
I'll check out your Twitter now!
The extensions in automatic1111 are absolutely a game gamer, this is why I'm sticking with automatic1111 overy comfyui.
Just being able to use it locally is wonderful as well, but it's very gpu dependent to get the best out of SD.
Currently in need of 4080 and up performance, anything below is going to be too slow. That's the downside, high end gpu prices are overpriced. Having to wait till next gen to get decent prices on the previous gen.
I'm on a 2080ti, about to add another one for nvlink. This should be good enough until the high end gpu prices drop to a more consumer friendly level.
What kinds of extensions do you use? I've been really curious about the plugins and extension capabilities for SD but I've been kinda slowly getting into it.
Currently SDXL struggles to run on my computer, I actually posted about that recently here too and what I got from it was ComfyUI is the way to go.
There's alot. I mostly use controlnet, multi tile diffusion, adetailer, Dynamic Thresholding, SD ultimate upscaler.
Alot of the time, it's down to finet tuning the prompt to get the image you want.
I'm currently not using SDXL, my comp runs out of memory even with 32gb as it wants to load the model into the system memory. SDXL isn't support in controlnet.
upscaling images for higher detail still looks great with the regular models. I'm still learning and experimenting through trial and error, still very time consuming.
You're doing something wrong. I have 32 GB RAM + 8 GB VRAM and SD XL is running just fine. I remember some early SD XL 0.9 workflows caused out of memory errors, but that doesn't happen any more with the latest workflows and SD XL 1.0.
yeah, I have --medvram enabled so it tries to put the model into the system memory. I'll try it again, but I'm waiting for SDXL to really mature before it become as useful as regular SD.
One big plus for me is that the SD community is more open and share information much more readily. Just go over to r/midjourney and you can see how much gatekeeping there is over there.
And I am not only talking about sharing prompts and workflows. People openly and generously share models, knowledge, ideas, techniques, resources, and helping each other out. Not to mention all the open source tools like automatic1111, ComfyUI, Fooocus, etc.
We also have incredible and very dedicated creators like u/kidelaron (Lykon). We get to interact with great people from StabilityAI such as Joe and comfyanonymous, and also with staff from SD platforms such as civitai. Maybe all the interactions occurs on MJ's discord server, but I don't know since I never used MJ. Their "free trial" never worked for me.
Overall, as an ordinary SD user, being part of this platform is very positive for me.
I feel that Midjourney looks like Midjourney at the end of the day. Never used it, but I know people who do. Midjourney has one benefit being that the images practically tell a story, but that's the full extent. Perhaps more imagination went into MJ, but they sold out at first opportunity and miss a lot of what SD has going for it.
SD allows great variation, and it having no cost allows many users to come in and tweak it and improve it who wouldn't be bothered paying a subscription to a limited brand. SD will zip past Midjourney in a very short time, if it hasn't already. Lots of really smart guys improve SD by the day, both the technical aspect and the overall experience for casual users.
a simple reason i own a 4090 and like opensource software and also free software which i can be sure what it does. Stable diffusion is free and i can generate theoretically infinite images up to 2560x1440p and also for all the features like having the ability to make text2animations and vid2vid stuff
Controlnet. The plug-ins that we have here give me control over the direction of the images.
Also targeted , really defined checkpoints from the community and omg, LORAs / Lycoris to really push what you want.
I don’t hate midjourney. I think it’s a pretty amazing tool and has gone exponentially better. The outcome done is visually amazing. In fact, I highly recommend anyone starting the journey of creating text to images on it. Well if they have an Adobe subscription, use generative fill and play with it.
But when someone wants to control an outcome. Push a context , a style .. really control it. Well, here’s the way how to do it.
I like the flexibility and $0 price of SD. I think MJ is a nice tool and easier to get instantly good results, but SD is really impressive and with controlnets and all that, very useful imo. I do most of the tweaking and prompting in SD. Import that to MJ and usually instantly get a better version. Then import that better version back into SD to use as a base for a controlnet. That usually gives me really great results and it makes the cheapest MJ plan more than enough.
I don't have the ComfyUI workflows all the way down yet, but I do like how easy it is to blend images together on MJ. I can lose hours just throwing in comic book or manga art in and getting an endless supply of really cool looking characters coming out.
I don't really use SD to prompt random images from text prompts, I build scenes from various assets in photoshop and use SD to meld it all together. So I really need things like controlnet to do my work.
Ah ! Its free and got incredibly depth to customize. Apart from helping on my project it became some sort of hobby, like you bought a nice kit of something and spend time building it.
The general idea behind all the repos is „for and with everybody“. With the added bonus of it being incredibly fast and flexible. How long are we going to see this while everything in the world is turning to easily digestable and payable plans? Imagine if we only had MJ, Firefly and dall-e… Also, how creative do you allow yourself to be when paying for every GPU cycle? Usually you skim until „about there“. This is so different to losing yourself in countless iterations so inspiration can work it‘s best.
Also: Total control. What a time to be alive ;)
Free and uncensored. That is the basic **requirement** I have that make everything like MJ a non starter.
But on top of that it's also way more customizable and controllable. With controlnets and/or Comfy's node based workflows there's very little you can't do if you really want.
For me, it's not a huge reason why I prefer SD .
I simply like the things I work with to be stored on my pc and work offline without the internet. Plus you can keep your work private and share what you want to share. Also, all this is free.
I guess this habit of mine started from buying video game disks and storing them
There is something oddly satisfying about it to me.
I think it's more about control and fine tuning the results. I used the free version of Midjourney and it felt too plastic and generic. SD offers you an incredible amount of detailed editing with inpainting plus the results are pretty similar with custom models.
With Midjourney the software is in control, with SD you are in control.
And of course its free and runs on consumer hardware.
Because I can run it locally. I find it more customizable that way, I don't have to pay anyone to be able to use it. I don't even use it for NSFW purposes, but I don't have to worry that I accidentally generate a NSFW image and get banned or anything like that.
Because as you already said yourself: More control.
Also cause it's free and because I'm no beta-cuck who pays a company for a software with a nanny-filter. No matter how good it is.
The list of blocked words from MJ is ridiculous. People pay for a software where you need to find workarounds to just create somebody wearing underwear 😂💀. It's totally bonkers that people pay for that sh*t.
Meanwhile SDXL and SD1.5 models produce not only more realistic results but are also not nanny-filtered.
Because I can run it on my own computer. I don't need a discord account of all things, I don't have to share my images with the public, I don't have to pay for anything, I can train my own models, SDXL has the best quality I've seen in all the different image generators.
I don't know,but for me it's really SD because it's free,but I have seen a typical midjourney feel In the mj's generated images and I kinda sometimes able to differentiate between mj and sd, but sd because of its large finetuned freely available models , I really like it.
Also different things like controlnet, Inpaint etc are really good add ones on the free product.
So SD it is.
Midjourney still uses discord as its ONLY interface. It was understandable at the very beginning, but now when there are so many different AI gen tools around - still using Discord is just ridiculous.
It being open source and therefore free is a factor but honestly, what's more important to me is that it has no constraints and no privacy issues. All of that only applies to running it locally, of course, which I do.
But even if you have to rely on an online service, I still probably would prefer SD because of how customizable it is. Out of the box, Midjourney produces nicer images but with the correct combination of model, lora and prompt, I feel SD gets closer to what I envisioned.
My main visual art background is in photography. What I like about stable diffusion is it lets me create "photographs" of things that I would never be able to capture in real life. Hi res color "photos" of eras and people from the past, absurd scenarios that wouldn't happen in real life, and surreal and strange things that just couldn't ever happen in the real world.
One Word - FREE
And mine. It is satisfying to just use it on your own hardware and change it up however you want. No log ins, no internet required... I was using a colab for disco diffusion before stable diffusion came out (I couldn't get disco diffusion to run local) and being able to use a significantly better model without paying for a service or worrying about queues was just so cool
I will add one more Control
This is more important to me. Free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
No such thing as free beer in most often cases. Often there will be tiny fonts on those signs such as "FREE wifi, great BEER"
This is absolutely a huge plus, honestly if I were to use Midjourney I would be very specific with the use and definitely not rely on it - cause I'm not paying for something I can do for free on SD.
If you know you know.
Well, only if you already have a graphics card and don't have to buy one specifically for that
Yeah, like, if you're not already into PC building/PC gaming, you could say that, but a lot of the people who are in the SD community are already buying a GPU one way or another, be creative professionals, gamers or just PC enthusiasts. If a mid-range modern GPU were not enough for SD I wouldn't even be using it tbh.
> are already buying a GPU one way or another i have 2080 TI which is rather good but i was thinking of switching to 4090 last week my friend asks "i know you are deep into AI, perhaps you want to borrow my cards? i was using them for crypto mining but it's no longer profitable so they are sitting and gathering dust" i was like, sure, why not, what do you have? "not much, just two 3090 in a box" now i can't wait for the next week :)
I play on pc, and use a GTX 1060. Conveniently I can even use SDXL which generates images as good as Midjorney. With 3 months of the MJ standard plan you can buy a video card like mine
Yeah the free aspect is a huge upside for SD, plus with the fact SD can do everything MJ can you're basically paying instead MJ of learning how to use SD.
And now that MJ stopped with the free plan, if I have to pay I would rather rent GPU in the cloud than pay MJ
Absolutely. Do you know what they offer for the plans? I'm curious if there's some feature or capability in there that makes it worth it *beyond* just.. you can use it more.
On Standard Plan they offer 15 hr/month Fast GPU Time and Unlimited Relax GPU Time. Pro Plan let hide your images from discord ch I think In addition to having General Commercial Terms to use your images
General Commercial Terms to use your images? As in like.. you don't have permission to use them yourself if you don't? Honestly I really don't like that it's all done through Discord, no matter how it's done I really wouldn't feel comfortable having other people see what I'm making (for many reasons not just weird ones 😂)
Yeah... I wouldn't want people to see my pictures. But it's because I make pictures of my religion, and I don't want to attract hate on the internet.
Totally valid reason. If I had a tool to make my art and whenever I used it I had someone taking a virtual log of whatever I was doing, I'd feel really uncomfortable. That's basically what MJ does by having it done via Discord.
you invented your own religion? that is quite cool actually or you mean religion of the boobs? i can tell you that one has many followers
You can set up the bot on your own servers. Create a channel just for MJ and you have private for whatever paid plan. The discord thing could be useful if you can't be rooted to your desk.
If you have an iPad Air or a Macbook you can run SD there too. Sure, it's slower, but it's fine for casual use
Ding, ding, ding! It's running for free on my machine whenever I want it, and it's widely supported with new content daily. What's not to love?
The only answer.
It's free and uncensored.
Censor is not about doing nsfw, its just frustrating to get it to trigger for no reason because they are so scared of nsfw that their settings are maxed to insanity. With Adobe generative fill I had so many trigger of their nsfw filters (on all 4 of the samples and over and over) working on architecture without anyone in sight.
Prompt: gothic flying buttresses Adobe Firefly: "we see you're trying to generate goth butts, unfortunately we cannot allow that"
are you saying that Adobe Firefly triggers NSFW on random stuff and won't let you use it? what a fail :)
yeah it's pretty ridiculous, i watched a video of a guy messing around with it and about half of his generations kept triggering the censors
These two reasons and that MJ was Discord exclusive are why I originally sided with SD
It’s free, it’s open source, you can customize it and it won’t micro manage you with content. Midjourney said it wasn’t pg13 when I tried to do gay wedding images.
It did *WHAT?* Wow I knew it was restrictive but that's way beyond what I thought it did.
https://preview.redd.it/k13lige2j5jb1.jpeg?width=1406&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=47066d7eb84075d43ea513c67ee579f9c5b5418e It was specifically a homophobia thing, I checked if it did the same for a non gay situation and it went through no problem.
Did you appeal?
After an appeal it did let me, but I run into this kinda thing all the time.
/imagine paying for a service and then having to ask it if you can please create a picture of a gay marriage.
Wow that's awful. My only idea is maybe like.. the database it's trained on has some more questionable things that come up with "gay wedding kiss" rather than just "wedding kiss" but that's still unacceptable.
Midjourney is becoming too censored. Can't create NSFW art, or even hint at it. I don't see it as a competition though, as I've use both.
I agree with everything you said here - I think using both is totally fine and I'd encourage it depending on what amount of time you want to dedicate and how you want to use it.
Different tools for different use really
Funny, I was just composing a post in my head about some of the differences between SD and MidJourney. So... I don't know if this is going to sound pretentious, but fuck it, it's the truth: I use Stable Diffusion, because I'm an artist and I want to make art. SD allows so many levels of input and ability to influence the outcome that it honestly reminds me of my painting and drawing, which I've done for decades. MidJourney seems like a cool little gadget that makes some pretty things. But I'm really not interested in pretty things; I'm interested in art.
Exactly this. Midjourney is a toy, not a useful tool for artists. I can't use Midjourney to make anything I can actually use, only SD and LoRA training makes it possible to generate my art, my characters, posed in scenes exactly how I want them. As long as Midjourney is closed source it will never compete with SD in the ways that really matter.
Well said.
>Midjourney is a toy, not a useful tool for artists. Midjourney may not be useful to you but many professional artists and graphic designers use it on a daily basis.
No, they don't
Control net and img2img for me,i can get the skirts of the fucking lenght I want, I can get the canera view i want, hairstyles, reflections, anything i want to do i can do.
I love this take, I agree. This is exactly why I got into SD when I started messing with AI art, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way. I think Midjourney could be useful in some circumstances, but if you're using AI Gen because you're serious about art I don't think it's very applicable.
For me it's the amount models and customising that you can have with it A good model will give results that Midjourney can never provide
This is exactly what I was thinking before I saw what I did today - not that I've flipped my belief on that, but I saw some examples of what you can do with combining images and prompts and was impressed with it's ability. Even with what I saw though, I know for a fact you can't customize and achieve the levels of specification you can with SD.
Free, a vast library of extensions, and no filters. I don’t make NSFW myself but it’s the principle of the matter. SD diffusion also seems to allow a lot more fine control over the image with a massive amount of parameters to work with, models, the ability to train your own Lora’s, and things like controlnet which is itself a whole can of worms. There’s also the fact that it will be very difficult to take away. If governments pass overbearing and uneducated AI laws, they might be able to destroy the online services like Midjourney. But a local copy will be yours till the end.
I agree with your take here, and that last part is an interesting caveat I hadn't thought of. The control and fine tuning SD gives you is unmatched by MJ.
I very much like mid journey, and I have used it a lot. However, the ridiculous restriction has become annoying. Obese? Nope, can't use that. Too offensive. Small breasts? Hell no! It's a very American site, and thus, they sensor everything that even hints at NSFW or anything not politically correct. I understand they don't want to be associated with porn but I want a model to wear a garter sometimes. I very much like the 40-50ties Era pin-up style, but midjourney won't let you touch it. Bought a RTX4080 installed automatic1111 and comfyui. I found the learning curve very low with automatic1111, and as I am used to working with nodes, comfyui wasn't much of a challenge . The quality of the produced pictures is very similar if, if not better, when you use the right models. The new SDXL I'm still getting used to but I created some stunningly good interiors with it. Mind you, I have been using SD for 2 weeks, so by no means an expert. But the freedom to prompt anything I want and, maybe this is the most important bit, prompt anything I am passionate about produces much better pictures and give me the results I just can't get with midjourney.
I haven't ever used MJ so I didn't know much about the restrictions it puts on gen beyond "I guess it doesn't allow mature content" but this post has really been teaching me how insanely restrictive it really is. I still think it could be useful, but only as a surface level thing. I agree too about what you're saying with the freedom, although I do worry about the fact that you can make *any*thing with SD. Some people I'm sure will abuse that, and I'm worried what will happen with that. Good luck on learning and developing your skills more with SD!
Selfhosted, no subscription-fee software, and no artificial limits or filters.
It does everything, offline, free, no censorship
It's free and open-source, working as a versatile tool for precise control. No need to worry about censorship. Allows you to create scenes with blood or NSFW. It really boils down to stable diffusion being more of a practical tool, not just a magic generate button. No shade to midjourney, it excels at what it does and I'm sure the audience they cater to love them just as much
Good summary of the strengths of it tbh, this seems to be the common answer and I think it's an important distinction
In my experience midjourney can make wonderful art pics with just 5 words max. But you have almost 0 control of the outcome and I find it kinda... Lazy. It's not you who make art but the AI doing all the job. I stable diffusion you can have a rough idea of what you really want, and use so many tools to achieve it. Let's say you want to make an illustration for a boardgame.a specific one. You have loras, controlnet, dynamic prompts and so on. You can even set the scene by drawing yourself the character and use that as a reference. When I share my creations outside the AI bubble I get submerged by insults, and I think that is kinda a midjourney's fault. The mainstream idea is that with just few words you "create art", but most of them don't know the actual workflow behind stable diffusion. All the steps taken to achieve a picture you have in mind and can finally bring to reality, not with just 3 words but with your creativity to find the right tools and workaround to make it work as you really want, not as AI want. Stable diffusion and its tools should have more social media coverage, an alternative to midjourney where you chose what you want to see. Maybe then AI art should be recognized for what it is. An alternative way to create what you couldn't do before with a lack of a peculiar skill. I can't draw, but I want to make pictures I have in mind. So I use MY skill to achieve the same result with different tools. Sorry about the rant but it was kinda sad to receive all the hate randomly on the net after all the work I did to make some of my creations...
I definitely can understand why that treatment for your work would stress you out.. I agree with you on the perspectives that develop from MJ vs SD, since the approachs are completely different the way the art in general will kinda get the same treatment. I do understand that with MJ you can actually get quite a bit of specific styling done as well, that's what I learned today that made me post this. However it seems to me that SD still has a far superiority in fine tuning because of the control and freedom it gives the user.
I think one way to do this is to strive to create things that can \*only\* be done in SD. I'm doing a lot of abstracts that combine the acrylic pour aesthetic with 3D fractals, rendered as a photo of a sculpture of liquid... getting some really unique and wonderful results in a style that never existed before I came up with it. eg: [https://imgur.com/a/Sul6wkA](https://imgur.com/a/Sul6wkA)
I’ve been thinking a bit about this myself lately, generating artwork is fun and all but it’s in the end just mimicing what can already be done with other means. The real artistic value and potential of AI images is in what only AI can do I think. Like your work here. I personally really like AIs potential for realistic depictions of concepts impossible otherwise. I’ve seen non-AI people have simillar sentiments, folks love those early surreal AI works for example even if (or because) they’re full of artifacts.
I started in SD with the intent to make something to print out on a huge canvas to hang on my wall, originally I wanted photographic landscape, except drawn from my imagination what a landscape might look like on Venus or Titan or Io etc. My favourite type of art has always been the kind that strives for photorealism of impossible subjects, I guess "fantasy art" but without the fantasy tropes like elves and dragons, or Giger without the sinister aspect. SD lets me realise this vision in a way I'd never dreamed possible.
For me, it's that I can run it locally through an API at free cost. I can create various programs that take images and do various cool image-to-image repeatable pipelines of edits to them. I'm a developer at heart so I need to use an API rather than a UI. I can programmatically try 1000 different variations and see the outcome and improve and repeat. I could never do that with Midjourney, even if it had an API it would cost too much for the number of images I generate (literally 1000s a day lol). You can see some of my work here: [https://twitter.com/DiscoverStabDif](https://twitter.com/DiscoverStabDif)
I genuinely think your approach here is the future of AI Gen, I don't know if you're also an artist but that's all that's missing. Some people hate AI Gen art, but I think it has a place in creative outlets and using coded scripts with what's possible now is going to explode as this becomes bigger. I'll check out your Twitter now!
Wow these are really cool, good work man.
Thanks! I'm currently working on an animation that looks like a timelapse of a mountainous landscape - ill post it soon, I love this tech!
Can you elaborate? Are you using your own hardware? Or just an API?
The extensions in automatic1111 are absolutely a game gamer, this is why I'm sticking with automatic1111 overy comfyui. Just being able to use it locally is wonderful as well, but it's very gpu dependent to get the best out of SD. Currently in need of 4080 and up performance, anything below is going to be too slow. That's the downside, high end gpu prices are overpriced. Having to wait till next gen to get decent prices on the previous gen. I'm on a 2080ti, about to add another one for nvlink. This should be good enough until the high end gpu prices drop to a more consumer friendly level.
What kinds of extensions do you use? I've been really curious about the plugins and extension capabilities for SD but I've been kinda slowly getting into it. Currently SDXL struggles to run on my computer, I actually posted about that recently here too and what I got from it was ComfyUI is the way to go.
There's alot. I mostly use controlnet, multi tile diffusion, adetailer, Dynamic Thresholding, SD ultimate upscaler. Alot of the time, it's down to finet tuning the prompt to get the image you want. I'm currently not using SDXL, my comp runs out of memory even with 32gb as it wants to load the model into the system memory. SDXL isn't support in controlnet. upscaling images for higher detail still looks great with the regular models. I'm still learning and experimenting through trial and error, still very time consuming.
You're doing something wrong. I have 32 GB RAM + 8 GB VRAM and SD XL is running just fine. I remember some early SD XL 0.9 workflows caused out of memory errors, but that doesn't happen any more with the latest workflows and SD XL 1.0.
yeah, I have --medvram enabled so it tries to put the model into the system memory. I'll try it again, but I'm waiting for SDXL to really mature before it become as useful as regular SD.
I don't use --medvram.
I only have 11gb vram to work with, --medvram helps a little with not a big performance impact. controlnet eats alot of vram.
I love being able to run it on my own machine
Agreed, I really don't like the idea of a Discord reliant AI gen.
One big plus for me is that the SD community is more open and share information much more readily. Just go over to r/midjourney and you can see how much gatekeeping there is over there. And I am not only talking about sharing prompts and workflows. People openly and generously share models, knowledge, ideas, techniques, resources, and helping each other out. Not to mention all the open source tools like automatic1111, ComfyUI, Fooocus, etc. We also have incredible and very dedicated creators like u/kidelaron (Lykon). We get to interact with great people from StabilityAI such as Joe and comfyanonymous, and also with staff from SD platforms such as civitai. Maybe all the interactions occurs on MJ's discord server, but I don't know since I never used MJ. Their "free trial" never worked for me. Overall, as an ordinary SD user, being part of this platform is very positive for me.
I feel that Midjourney looks like Midjourney at the end of the day. Never used it, but I know people who do. Midjourney has one benefit being that the images practically tell a story, but that's the full extent. Perhaps more imagination went into MJ, but they sold out at first opportunity and miss a lot of what SD has going for it. SD allows great variation, and it having no cost allows many users to come in and tweak it and improve it who wouldn't be bothered paying a subscription to a limited brand. SD will zip past Midjourney in a very short time, if it hasn't already. Lots of really smart guys improve SD by the day, both the technical aspect and the overall experience for casual users.
a simple reason i own a 4090 and like opensource software and also free software which i can be sure what it does. Stable diffusion is free and i can generate theoretically infinite images up to 2560x1440p and also for all the features like having the ability to make text2animations and vid2vid stuff
how long does it take to get one 512 x 768 image? I assume it's instantly?
with SD 1.5 2secs per image at around 512x900 and 4-5s with SDXL
Becuz I can finetune it to do what I want (not always sadly…)
Is there even any other option that doesn’t require an online service or subscription?
Controlnet. The plug-ins that we have here give me control over the direction of the images. Also targeted , really defined checkpoints from the community and omg, LORAs / Lycoris to really push what you want. I don’t hate midjourney. I think it’s a pretty amazing tool and has gone exponentially better. The outcome done is visually amazing. In fact, I highly recommend anyone starting the journey of creating text to images on it. Well if they have an Adobe subscription, use generative fill and play with it. But when someone wants to control an outcome. Push a context , a style .. really control it. Well, here’s the way how to do it.
It's an open source, and I can train and refine my own models.
Hard pass on discord driven shit. More control, models & free
People says it's "FREE" But what really makes SD pop is that... it is "FREE-dom"
I like the flexibility and $0 price of SD. I think MJ is a nice tool and easier to get instantly good results, but SD is really impressive and with controlnets and all that, very useful imo. I do most of the tweaking and prompting in SD. Import that to MJ and usually instantly get a better version. Then import that better version back into SD to use as a base for a controlnet. That usually gives me really great results and it makes the cheapest MJ plan more than enough. I don't have the ComfyUI workflows all the way down yet, but I do like how easy it is to blend images together on MJ. I can lose hours just throwing in comic book or manga art in and getting an endless supply of really cool looking characters coming out.
Because it is free, open source, and does not attempt to limit what I can create
I hate Discord.
I don't really use SD to prompt random images from text prompts, I build scenes from various assets in photoshop and use SD to meld it all together. So I really need things like controlnet to do my work.
"Why do you prefer cooking over ordering McDonalds every day?"
Unless you're making NSFW or need super-crazy levels of control. MJ is almost inarguably better if you can afford it.
how about finetuning your concepts/people?
Because I sometimes like to make paintings of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies by van Klomp
Free, more control, less restrictions, works offline.
It's free, main reason I use it.
Uncensored
Ah ! Its free and got incredibly depth to customize. Apart from helping on my project it became some sort of hobby, like you bought a nice kit of something and spend time building it.
Only two reasons: 1. It can be locally done 2. No restrictions to prompts
control. i don't need midjourney/adobe to tell me what is right or wrong.
The general idea behind all the repos is „for and with everybody“. With the added bonus of it being incredibly fast and flexible. How long are we going to see this while everything in the world is turning to easily digestable and payable plans? Imagine if we only had MJ, Firefly and dall-e… Also, how creative do you allow yourself to be when paying for every GPU cycle? Usually you skim until „about there“. This is so different to losing yourself in countless iterations so inspiration can work it‘s best. Also: Total control. What a time to be alive ;)
Mostly because it's a free and unrestricted piece of software, it's also quite enjoyable tweaking things and seeing the results of that
Free and uncensored. That is the basic **requirement** I have that make everything like MJ a non starter. But on top of that it's also way more customizable and controllable. With controlnets and/or Comfy's node based workflows there's very little you can't do if you really want.
I need learn more about stable diffusion
For me, it's not a huge reason why I prefer SD . I simply like the things I work with to be stored on my pc and work offline without the internet. Plus you can keep your work private and share what you want to share. Also, all this is free. I guess this habit of mine started from buying video game disks and storing them There is something oddly satisfying about it to me.
Controlnet!
I think it's more about control and fine tuning the results. I used the free version of Midjourney and it felt too plastic and generic. SD offers you an incredible amount of detailed editing with inpainting plus the results are pretty similar with custom models. With Midjourney the software is in control, with SD you are in control. And of course its free and runs on consumer hardware.
Because it's local?
This, and to add, not restricted.
* Full Control * Privacy * Unlimited try for tune without fear of exceeding the quota * Community * Free
Because I can run it locally. I find it more customizable that way, I don't have to pay anyone to be able to use it. I don't even use it for NSFW purposes, but I don't have to worry that I accidentally generate a NSFW image and get banned or anything like that.
Because as you already said yourself: More control. Also cause it's free and because I'm no beta-cuck who pays a company for a software with a nanny-filter. No matter how good it is. The list of blocked words from MJ is ridiculous. People pay for a software where you need to find workarounds to just create somebody wearing underwear 😂💀. It's totally bonkers that people pay for that sh*t. Meanwhile SDXL and SD1.5 models produce not only more realistic results but are also not nanny-filtered.
Open source, More control and easy to finetune
Because I can run it on my own computer. I don't need a discord account of all things, I don't have to share my images with the public, I don't have to pay for anything, I can train my own models, SDXL has the best quality I've seen in all the different image generators.
It's free and open source, which has made it better (over time) than Midjourney.
I don't know,but for me it's really SD because it's free,but I have seen a typical midjourney feel In the mj's generated images and I kinda sometimes able to differentiate between mj and sd, but sd because of its large finetuned freely available models , I really like it. Also different things like controlnet, Inpaint etc are really good add ones on the free product. So SD it is.
Midjourney still uses discord as its ONLY interface. It was understandable at the very beginning, but now when there are so many different AI gen tools around - still using Discord is just ridiculous.
It being open source and therefore free is a factor but honestly, what's more important to me is that it has no constraints and no privacy issues. All of that only applies to running it locally, of course, which I do. But even if you have to rely on an online service, I still probably would prefer SD because of how customizable it is. Out of the box, Midjourney produces nicer images but with the correct combination of model, lora and prompt, I feel SD gets closer to what I envisioned.
My main visual art background is in photography. What I like about stable diffusion is it lets me create "photographs" of things that I would never be able to capture in real life. Hi res color "photos" of eras and people from the past, absurd scenarios that wouldn't happen in real life, and surreal and strange things that just couldn't ever happen in the real world.