I remember one evening in 1990 when I successfully downloaded an entire issue of Crisis Magazine from the Twenties to a 3.5 inch floppy disk. It took some time for the original images, poetry, stories, and essays to come to me over a network of university computers that was part of the Internet. This was before the World Wide Web would make something like this even easier to access, but I sensed that something had radically and structurally changed in my entertainment and information cosmos. As I perused the prize that appeared on my computer, I yelled to my wife, “Get rid of the T.V. We don’t need it anymore!”
Recently, while watching the U.S. Open on T.V., I remembered my epiphany from thirty-two years ago because I was in the middle of another one that seemed to be of a similar magnitude. After reading a few articles about AI, and in particular, the recent ease of accessing text-to-image generators, I decided to keep one eye on the tennis match and the other on my phone. It was pretty easy to begin experimenting with the Stable Diffusion Demo. “Stable Diffusion is a state of the art text-to-image model that generates images from text.”
