1 Making our First Image: “A damn fine cup of coffee”
“I knew there was a way to blend records together, but I didn't know how to. This was haunting me when I was in my teens. In my frustration, I decided to start experimenting with electronics. I tested the torque factor on different turntables. I had to figure needles out.”
- Grandmaster Flash
This chapter covers
- Getting a feel for what is possible with Stable Diffusion.
- Creating simple images with Stable Diffusion
- Understanding the basic arguments and scripts used by CompVis Stable Diffusion.
- The basics of Prompt Engineering.
- How to modify the source code to change the behavior of Stable Diffusion.
You likely didn’t expect a book on Stable Diffusion to begin with a quote from one of the founding fathers of hiphop, but there’s an illustrative parallel to be made: Early hiphop mixed records in a similar way that Stable Diffusion mixes images; taking the familiar and rearranging it in a way that it becomes something never seen before.
All of us, since we were children bored in class, have doodled in notebooks hoping to transmit some image from our mind to the listless lined paper in front of us. Usually without the success we were hoping for. Generative AI allows us to revisit those childhood aspirations with renewed vigor, and far more impressive results!