To complement Henry’s Short Takes presentation this month, I wanted to bring attention to three fun A.I. image generation apps running on Apple Silicon.

Diffusers from HuggingFace is the simplest of the three.  It’s free in the Mac app store and lets you create images from text prompts. It is less capable than the other apps mentioned here, but by far the simplest to use.

DiffusionBee is a free A.I. app in the Mac App Store that can quickly and easily generate images from text prompts or other images.  It has an easy to learn interface and produces much better pictures than I was able generate using OpenAI’s Dall-e in our SMUG meeting late last year.  DiffusionBee is built on StabilityAI’s Stable Diffusion technology.

Draw Things is another free A.I. app in the App Store, remarkably it also runs on iPhones and iPads.  The UI for Draw Things is considerably more extensive than that for DiffusionBee and it takes a bit more effort to produce a good image, but it can provide spectacular results.

All of these apps can use any of the tens of thousands of Stable Diffusion Models available from HuggingFace.co and CIVITAI.com. CIVITAI also has hundreds of thousands of A.I. generated images. (FULL DISCLOSURE: The site is pretty much uncensored).

Finally, if you don’t have a device with Apple Silicon available, many of the models can run on the HuggingFace website.  For a fun image generator that uses both a text prompt and a starter image, try the InstantID demo on HuggingFace.  Upload a picture of yourself and regenerate it in any of 9 different styles.  Each time you run it you get a new interpretation.

There are lots of other Stable Diffusion UIs around, including those for generating Audio and Video, but the three presented here are my recommendation for a place to start learning about Stable Diffusion image generation.