Image Generation/Text To Image With Stable Diffusion (DALL-E 2 / MidJourney Alternative)

What Is Image Generation/Text To Image?

Thanks to the Stable Diffusion model, released by Stability AI, it is now possible to generate an image out of a simple text instruction, and get results equivalent to OpenAI DALL-E 2 or MidJourney. You can even generate impressive art images with these text to image model (also known as AI art generation).

Simply write a short text instruction and let the model generate an image out of it.

Here is an example. Let's generate an image for the following instruction:

Here is the result:

Maybe you would like to generate a more realistic image? Let's try the following:

Here is the result:

Impressive isn't it?

Stable Diffusion is the most advanced open-source text to image model as of this writing, and it is the best DALL-E 2 / MidJourney alternative!

Text to Image API

Building an inference API for image generation is a necessary step as soon a you want to use image generation in production. But building such an API is hard... First because you need to code the API (easy part) but also because you need to build a highly available, fast, and scalable infrastructure to serve your models behind the hood (hardest part). It is especially hard for machine learning models as they consume a lot of resources (memory, disk space, CPU, GPU...).

Such an API is interesting because it is completely decoupled from the rest of your stack (microservice architecture), so you can easily scale it independently, and you can access it using any programming language. Most machine learning frameworks are developed in Python, but it's likely that you want to access them from other languages like Javascript, Go, Ruby...