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In earlier discussions on art AI, I expressed significant skepticism in AI generated art for two reasons:
There was little proof that NSFW images could be done well, which was where a large part of online art commissions come from, and which indicated that there were likely some issues related to being able to get images of things you actually wanted instead of just taking whatever the AI would generate for you. Copying a human face in a portrait-style setup is one thing, but capturing bodies in various sexual positions without ending up with a cthuloid mess of dicks or at least falling hard into the uncanny valley is quite another.
The lack of stability, i.e. that it was hard to create a character or theme, and then change little bits of it at a time, e.g. create an image of a person eating an apple, and then also being able to create an image of that same person sitting and reading a book.
The things I've seen on /hdg/ have pretty convincingly proven to me that issue #1 has been solved, or never existed in the first place. I've seen some pessimistic takes that it requires tons of time and 98% of it is garbage, but the fact that random anons on 4chan can generate the level of quality I've seen means AI art has advanced quite a bit more than I thought it had.
I can't believe autistic booru taggers became the heralds of an artistic revolution. Has anyone seen Gwern lately, or is he filling up a 500tb RAID with Asuka pics?
Finally people asking the important questions
Yes.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AnimeResearch/comments/xumxfk/novelai_diffusion_has_arrived_nai_launches/
Is the whole NovelAI thing worth dropping the ten bucks to try it out at the image generator tier?
If you like anime, then go for it. It's pretty good.
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It's interesting, but if you're not hugely into this stuff, you can run a local StableDiffusion if you have 6GB+ of VRAM (sometimes down to 4GB, albeit slowly and with some frustrations) pretty easily using the automatic1111 UI, or it's possible to run on Google Colab for a couple hours a day at the free trial level.
NovelAI's version is better than almost all of its competitors -- I'm genuinely hungry to know how they increased the CLIP token limit -- but I don't know that it's 10 USD better unless you plan to use it pretty heavily.
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