The Joy and Dread of AI Image Generators Without Limits

The world’s most powerful AI projects remain locked inside large tech companies that are reluctant to provide unfettered access to them—either because they are so valuable or because they might be abused. The host of a YouTube channel dedicated to AI art, who goes by the name Bakz T. Future, claims that the Unstable Diffusion community is also creating content that might be considered child pornography. “These are people from dark corners of the internet who have essentially been given the keys to their dreams.” The provider of those keys is Emad Mostaque, an ex-hedge fund manager from the UK who created Stable Diffusion in collaboration with a collective called Stability.Ai, which is working on numerous open source AI projects. “We support the entire open source art space and wanted to create something anyone could develop on and use on consumer hardware,” he says, adding that he has been amazed by the range of uses people quickly found for Stable Diffusion. Developers have created plugins that add AI image generation to existing applications like Photoshop and Figma, adding new capabilities such as instantly applying a particular artistic style to an existing image.