Enlarge / Several examples of images generated using Stable Diffusion XL 1.0. (credit: Stable Diffusion)
On Wednesday, Stability AI released Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL), its next-generation open weights AI image synthesis model. It can generate novel images from text descriptions and produces more detail and higher-resolution imagery than previous versions of Stable Diffusion.
As with Stable Diffusion 1.4, which made waves last August with an open source release, anyone with the proper hardware and technical know-how can download the SDXL files and run the model locally on their own machine for free.
Local operation means that there is no need to pay for access to the SDXL model, there are few censorship concerns, and the weights files (which contain the neutral network data that makes the model function) can be fine-tuned to generate specific types of imagery by hobbyists in the future.