Scientists have built a framework that gives generative AI systems like DALL·E 3 and Stable Diffusion a major boost by condensing them into smaller models — without compromising their quality.
While I think the realism of some models is fantastic and the flexibility of others is great it is starting to feel like we're reaching a plateau on quality. Most of the white papers I've seen posted lately are about speed or some alternate way of doing what ControlNet or inpainting can already do.
When the output of something is the average of the inputs it will naturally be mediocre. It will always look like the output of a committee by the nature of how it is formed.
Certain artists stand out because they are different from everyone else, and that is why they are celebrated. M.C. Escher has a certain style that when run through AI looks like a skilled high school student doing their best impression of M.C. Escher.
Now as a tool to inspire, AI is pretty good at creating mashups of multiple things really fast. Those could be used by an actual artist to create something engaging. Most AI reminds me of photoshop battles.
That's maybe because we've reached the limits of what the current architecture of models can achieve on the current architecture of GPUs.
To create significantly better models without having a fundamentally new approach, you have to increase the model size. And if all accelerators accessible to you only offer, say, 24gb, you can't grow infinitely. At least not within a reasonable timeframe.
These kind of performance improvements have really cool potential for real time image/texture generation in games. I've already seen some games do this, but they usually rely on generating the images online.
ASCII and low graphic roguelike's have a lot of generation freedom where they can create very unique monsters/items/etc. However a lot of this flexibility is lost as you move to more polished games that require models and art assets for everything. This is also one of the many reasons that old-styled games are still popular, is because they often offer more variety and randomization than newer titles. I think generated art assets could be a cool way to bridge the gap though, and let more modern games have crazy unique monsters/items with visuals.
Edit: I wanted to edit my comment to leave some context for people.
Stability Matrix is an app that handles installing many different stable diffusion applications. (no more messing with InvokeAI's janky install script).
It also integrates with CivitAI and HuggingFace to directly download models and Lora and share them between your applications, saving you lots of diskspace.