How did AI painting take off? From history to technological breakthroughs, read the history of the hot AI painting in one article

After being shocked by the current level of AI painting (the superb AI painting machine, and its 234 armor-clad beautiful future warriors), the author is convinced that the rapid progress of AI painting today may have far exceeded everyone's expectation. The history of AI painting, and the recent breakthroughs, are worth sharing with you. Hence this article.

This article is divided into the following subsections:

1、2022, the advancing AI painting

2、The history of AI painting

3、How AI painting is advancing by leaps and bounds

4、The PK of top AI painting models

5、What the breakthrough of AI painting means to human beings

2022, The Attack of AI Painting

This year, AI drawing tools that automatically generate images by entering text descriptions have suddenly sprung up.

First up is Disco Diffusion.

Disco Diffusion is an AI image generation program that became popular at the beginning of February this year and renders images based on keywords describing a scene:

In April, the famous AI team OpenAI also released a new model, DALL-E Generation 2, named after the famous painter Dalí and the robot Wall-E, which also supports the generation of good images from text descriptions.

Many readers began to pay special attention to AI painting, perhaps because of the following news about AI artwork:

This is a digital oil painting generated using the AI painting service MidJourney, and the user who generated it entered it into the Colorado State Fair art contest and won first place. The story came to light and has sparked a huge debate on the internet to this day.

The technology of AI painting is still evolving, and its iteration can be described as "rapidly changing". Even if we compare AI painting at the beginning of this year with the present, the results are very different.

At the beginning of the year, Disco Diffusion could generate some atmospheric sketches, but it was basically impossible to generate human faces; just two months later, DALL-E 2 could already generate accurate facial features; now, the most powerful Stable Diffusion has made an order of magnitude change in the sophistication and speed of drawing.

AI painting is not a recent technology, but since this year, the quality of AI output has been increasing at a rate visible to the eye, and the efficiency has been reduced from an hour at the beginning of the year to a dozen seconds now.