Ran my first AI art prompt through a local model instead of online

I finally got Stable Diffusion running on my old gaming PC from 2020. Took me 3 tries to get the dependencies right, but once it worked, I was shocked at the quality. I fed it the same prompt I'd been using on a subscription service, and honestly the local result looked way better. Now I'm wondering if the free models are actually better than what you pay for these days. Anybody else try switching to local and notice a big difference?

2 comments

2 Comments

joseph_baker17d ago

Hooked my old 1070 up to this exact same thing last month and yeah, totally agree the local models are just better once you get them working. I was paying for Midjourney and thought it was great until I compared side by side with a local SD checkpoint and the local one just had more detail, less weird artifacts. That subscription stuff feels like it's been watered down or something, maybe they're saving compute costs by using smaller models. My prompts that used to give me generic looking stuff now actually have the lighting and texture I was asking for. Kinda mad I spent money on that subscription for six months when this was sitting here free the whole time.

the_vera16d ago

@joseph_baker what if the online services are just using the free models and charging us for it lol