August

2 events

Editors' summary

Stable Diffusion ships its weights, and an AI image wins a state fair

On 22 August, Stability AI released Stable Diffusion and published the weights. A single consumer graphics card could turn out a 512×512 image in seconds, and unlike DALL·E 2, which was invitation-only, or Midjourney, which lived in Discord, it ran on your own machine and could be modified. It was built with the CompVis group at LMU Munich, Runway, LAION and EleutherAI.

At the end of the month came reports that a piece made with Midjourney had taken first place in the fine arts competition at the Colorado State Fair. Its maker explained that he had chosen it from hundreds of generations; the objection that the win was unfair did not go away.

Image generation became something you ran yourself, and the question of whose work it was reached a general audience in the same few weeks.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record2 events

22
ModelStability AI / Runway
Stable Diffusion is published, and the weights are anyone's
Stability AI released Stable Diffusion to the public, publishing the weights themselves. A single consumer graphics card with around 6.9GB of VRAM could produce a 512×512 image in seconds. It was the first capable text-to-image model whose weights anyone could download. Built with the CompVis group at LMU Munich, Runway, LAION, and EleutherAI, it shipped under a Creative ML OpenRAIL-M licence permitting both commercial and non-commercial use. Unlike DALL·E 2, which was invitation-only, or Midjourney, which lived in Discord, it ran on your own machine and could be modified, and fine-tunes and derivatives multiplied immediately. The fights over the rights to the works in its training data start here too.
31
PeopleJason Allen
An AI-made image takes first prize at a state fair
Jason Allen's "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial," made with Midjourney, was reported to have won first place in the digitally manipulated photography category of the Colorado State Fair's fine arts competition, beating twenty other entrants for a $300 prize, and the result became an argument. Allen said he had worked through more than 900 generated images over 80 to 100 hours to arrive at it; thousands of comments online called the win unfair. It was the first widely known case of generative output entering an existing structure for judging art, and it put the questions of whether this counts as a tool, and who the author is, in front of a general audience. Allen later tried to register the copyright and was refused by the US Copyright Office.

↑ 2022

Stable Diffusion is published, and the weights are anyone's

An AI-made image takes first prize at a state fair