I played with AI last night.

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NightCafe

For the majority of the year, I've been playing with NightCafe, to generate AI artworks and attempt to upgrade my Platdude Pixelart.
At some point in the past week, they slapped adverts on it.

Now, don't get me wrong, I understand the need for this. They have costs, they need to keep things running smoothly.
"Subscribe to remove the adverts" they suggest.
But, here's the thing..

The Pro/Subscriber accounts are relatively new.
When they appeared, I knew far too well that I'd paid for so many credits on the site, that a basic subscription would've been LESS.

Over the past 12 months, I've spent FAR much more on the site than the basic subscription would have cost me.
I don't want to sound like an entitled git, but damnit, I've more than paid my fair share towards the site..
And now I get adverts.

There's no "Pay for some credits, get x amount of time without adverts" option, either, and that's left a bitter taste in my mouth.
"Subscribe OR ELSE" is the feeling I'm getting from this decision.

So, I'm going for the "OR ELSE" option.

Diffusion Bee

Last night I spent hours playing around with various options, and I ended up installing Diffusion Bee onto my Macbook.
It runs on anything Apple Silicon, and can usually generate a decent image within about 20 seconds or so, give or take. (A figure that seems to vary wildly, depending on the complexity of the image... Or is that just my imagination?)

It'd be nice to have higher-resolution generation, and a few more options like a "I'm in no rush, take your time so my CPU doesn't get warm!" mode, but otherwise it's running nice and smoothly.
Today's Pixelart HD was done with it, and .. you can tell it's a bit blurry. But it's alright I suppose.

I'll keep tweaking the settings, and hopefully I can get even better output.

Apple!

There's also some relatively recent Apple-beta-stuff that seems to be pointing in the right direction, too.
... Though, god damnit, Apple write terrible instructions, and it took me a few hours just to get Python up and running, and staying available without disappearing every time I closed the Terminal, without even starting to make head-nor-tails of the rest of the rest of the instructions.
Grrr.
Typical Apple "Just Works" mentality, where everyone in the office has everything installed, but you don't, and you have to figure it all out for yourself.

*ugh*


"The robot explodes into a myriad of mathematics. Bright, Colourful." by DiffusionBee / Stable Diffusion