A new article has been published in PCWorld.com about the Stable Horde!
Overall a very well researched article. I can’t find any issues with it. Personally I would liken the AI Horde technology as a mix between BitTorrent and Folding@Home, but the former has some negative connotations for many people.
Some things I could address from the article
It’s not entirely clear whether every fork of Stable Diffusion should work, but you can try.
There’s no “forks” of stable diffusion. There’s checkpoints and multiple models and the horde supports every .ckpt model and some diffusers models. I suspect the author confused Stable Diffusion the model, with clients and frontends using it, like automatic1111.
There is a tiny bit of a catch: the kudos system. To prevent abuse of the system, the developer implemented a system where every request “costs” some amount of kudos. Kudos mean nothing except in terms of priority: each request subtracts kudos from your balance, putting you in “debt.” Those with the most debts get placed lowest in the queue. But if there are many clients contributing AI art, that really doesn’t matter, as even users with enormous kudos debts will see their requests fulfilled in seconds.
Indeed each request consumes kudos to fulfill, but you don’t actually go in debt. While we do record the historical amount of kudos you’ve consumed for statistics, your actual total as a registered user never goes below 0. This means as a registered user, you will always have more priority than an anonymous user (who typically remains at -50 kudos). Your kudos minimum also allows you to generate with slightly higher resolution and steps than an anonymous user.
Images won’t automatically download, but you can go to the Images tab and then manually download them.
That it totally dependent on the client. It works this way for Artbot, but Lucid Creations for example is a local application, so the images are saved with a button click. Other clients might save automatically.
Other than that, great article!
To be honest, I’ve been actually quite surprised that nobody has written about the SH until now. The SH went live in early September, soon after Stable Diffusion came out, and we’ve generated 13 Million images until now (or approximately $50K of value) but none of the big AI and AI Art focused news reports has given a single mention of it! Now, I am not one for conspiracy theories, but it sounds extraordinary unlikely that absolutely nobody in the scene has noticed us until now or felt we are newsworthy, especially since many people have directly tweeted to some of the big AI and Stable Diffusion players about it.
Oh well, a PC-magazine is the first to report on the Stable horde. So be it! I wonder how many people will discover the Stable Horde from it.