What You'll Learn
Learn what Stable Diffusion actually is—an open-source AI model from Stability AI that generates images—and how it differs from the applications (like Automatic1111 or ComfyUI) used to run it.
Video Walkthrough
Prefer watching to reading? Follow along with a step-by-step video guide.
What is Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion was the name of the open source model that Stability AI released in August, 2022. Since the initial release, newer models include Stable Diffusion 2.0, 2.1, Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Diffusion XL Turbo, Stable Cascade, and Stable Diffusion 3.
We compared all of these in this blog post. Here's the accompanying video as well.
The model is responsible for producing images.
Applications such as Automatic1111, WebUI Forge, Fooocus, ComfyUI, etc. are just the applications string together all the code to produce images from the model. You can share one model across many different applications.
Most diffusion models that we cover in this course were made available by Stability AI. The public name that Stability AI assigned to their diffusion model was called Stable Diffusion.
There are other diffusion models available including Playground, PixArt, and more. Filter by HuggingFace text2image to see other freely available models.
Online services like Midjourey, Leondardo, DALLE-3, all use much of the same/similar underlying technology - diffusion models.
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