Even if you don't want to take the 30 seconds to set it up in a free Google Colab environment, the paid DreamStudio version is still half the price of Dalle.
I can think of ways to fix Stable Diffusion since it's open-source. I think I could bridge the gaps as I see them in about a weekend of hacking. I'm not sure when I'll get that weekend.
(Footnote: What I want to do is not something I can explain without a technical blog-post-length document or a zoom call; it's about the same level of complexity as the other major SD hacks we've seen)
That said, for me, I agree that dalle does much better pencil sketches.
According to Google's Imagen paper this is literally because the pixels get multiplied by the cfg scale and start clipping; they have a technique called dynamic thresholding that replaces it. Not sure if SD uses this, but I saw Emad hinting they were training an Imagen model…
Sure, both SD and Midjourney produce absolutely beautiful artworks most of the time. But if you want something specific and out of the ordinary it takes a lot of attempts and promptcrafting (and sometimes you are unable to accomplish what you want at all).
However, my experience is that these prompts (which SD/MJ struggles with) often produce good results in Dalle2 even on the first try.
Of course, OpenAI has very limiting content policy. But if I have something very specific in mind and it passes their rules I currently chose Dalle-2. Even though I've spent much more time with SD.
I didn't investigate any further because I'm not actively trying to generate porn. It was pretty annoying to have my results blanked out because they were (apparently) NSFW - so either the filter was triggering a lot of false positives or the model was generating NSFW content for non-NSFW prompts.
To remove the filter, you just have to comment out the two lines of code which call it. Instructions are here: https://reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wv2nw0/tutoria...
Amusingly it's more open in every way.
Anyways I think it’s way too early to start taking sides. I enjoy using all these system.
I have no examples but imagine things like at the top of his game are immensely problematic, albeit not very visual to begin with.
https://github.com/hlky/stable-diffusion is another popular and good tool.
I expect most people aren't going to be generating images all day, so using a cloud-based service for occasional use will still make a lot of sense.
Stable Diffusion offers a paid service to do this too, and there's nothing wrong with that business model. Prices will probably come down, though.
I'd worry more about, say, keeping your photos on Google and losing your account somehow.