Image generation

6 entries between April 2022 and February 2024, 1 turning point.

Turning points

  1. Stability AI publishes the Stable Diffusion weights

    Stability AI, working with LMU Munich researchers, RunwayML, EleutherAI and LAION, published the full weights of Stable Diffusion on Hugging Face on 22 August 2022 under the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M license. The model ran on a single consumer graphics card.

Every entry

  1. Google pauses Gemini image generation of people

    Google stopped Gemini from generating images of people on 23 February 2024 after it produced racially diverse depictions of Nazi-era German soldiers and the US founding fathers. Senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan said tuning for diversity had overgeneralized.

  2. An AI image of Pope Francis in a puffer coat is taken for real

    A photorealistic image of Pope Francis in a white puffer coat, made with version 5 of Midjourney’s image model, spread across social media in late March 2023 and was widely taken for a photograph. Forbes and BuzzFeed News traced it to a Chicago construction worker.

  3. Getty Images bans AI-generated content over copyright

    Getty Images said on 21 September 2022 that it would prohibit the upload and sale of AI-generated images. Chief executive Craig Peters said the policy was meant to protect customers from legal and reputational risk while the copyright questions stayed unresolved.

  4. Stability AI publishes the Stable Diffusion weights

    Stability AI, working with LMU Munich researchers, RunwayML, EleutherAI and LAION, published the full weights of Stable Diffusion on Hugging Face on 22 August 2022 under the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M license. The model ran on a single consumer graphics card.

  5. Midjourney opens its image generator to public beta

    Midjourney, a small independent lab led by David Holz, opened its text-to-image tool to public beta in July 2022. Anyone could join its Discord server and generate images from written prompts with a limited number of free credits. There was no standalone web app.

  6. OpenAI announces DALL-E 2, its second text-to-image model

    OpenAI announced DALL-E 2 on 6 April 2022. It produced higher-resolution and more coherent images from written descriptions than the 2021 DALL-E, and could edit existing pictures or generate variations of them. Access ran through a waitlist.