Would someone be kind to explain what the current state of the art in image generation is (how does this compare to Midjourney and others)?
How do open source models stack up?
Also what are the most common use cases for image generation?
If you want to get arty, then state of the art for out-of-the-box typing in a prompt and clicking "generate" is probably MidJourney.
But if you're willing to spend some more time playing around with the open-source tooling, community finetunes, model augmentations (LyCORIS, etc), SD is probably going to get you the farthest.
> Also what are the most common use cases for image generation?
By sheer number of image generations? Take a guess...
Cat images right?
Catgirl images, to be precise.
That has been said, based on the configurations of these models, we are far from saturating what the best model can do. The problem is, FID is terrible metrics to evaluating these models so like LLM, we are a bit clueless about how to evaluate them now.
I've found that I rarely get a usable image completely as-is. It might take 5 or 10 generations to find something sort of ok, and even then I end up erasing the bad parts and letting it in-paint (which again takes multiple attempts). The T-rex had like 7 legs and two jaws, but was otherwise close to what I wanted... just keep erasing extra body parts until the in-painter finally takes a hint.
I was also going to do a few book covers for some Babylon 5 books, but it does so bad on celebrity faces. Looked like Koenig's mutant love child with Ernest Borgnine. Dunno what to do about that. I keep wondering if I shouldn't spend the next 10 years putting together my own training set of fantasy and science fiction art.
For the longest time I thought it was google imaging things and doing some photoshop to make things look like Pixar because it was so bad.