Stable Diffusion 3

Ridiculed Stable Diffusion 3 release excels at AI-generated body horror

AI, AI image generator, Biz & IT, body horror, image synthesis, machine learning, Stability AI, Stable Diffusion, Stable Diffusion 3 / Ari B / June 12, 2024

unstable diffusion —

Users react to mangled SD3 generations and ask, “Is this release supposed to be a joke?”

Benj Edwards – Jun 12, 2024 7: 26 pm UTC

Enlarge / An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 of a girl lying in the grass.

On Wednesday, Stability AI released weights for Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, an AI image-synthesis model that turns text prompts into AI-generated images. Its arrival has been ridiculed online, however, because it generates images of humans in a way that seems like a step backward from other state-of-the-art image-synthesis models like Midjourney or DALL-E 3. As a result, it can churn out wild anatomically incorrect visual abominations with ease.

A thread on Reddit, titled, “Is this release supposed to be a joke? [SD3-2B],” details the spectacular failures of SD3 Medium at rendering humans, especially human limbs like hands and feet. Another thread, titled, “Why is SD3 so bad at generating girls lying on the grass?” shows similar issues, but for entire human bodies.

Hands have traditionally been a challenge for AI image generators due to lack of good examples in early training data sets, but more recently, several image-synthesis models seemed to have overcome the issue. In that sense, SD3 appears to be a huge step backward for the image-synthesis enthusiasts that gather on Reddit—especially compared to recent Stability releases like SD XL Turbo in November.

“It wasn’t too long ago that StableDiffusion was competing with Midjourney, now it just looks like a joke in comparison. At least our datasets are safe and ethical!” wrote one Reddit user.

An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 Medium.
An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 of a girl lying in the grass.
An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 that shows mangled hands.
An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 of a girl lying in the grass.
An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 that shows mangled hands.
An AI-generated SD3 Medium image a Reddit user made with the prompt “woman wearing a dress on the beach.”
An AI-generated SD3 Medium image a Reddit user made with the prompt “photograph of a person napping in a living room.”

AI image fans are so far blaming the Stable Diffusion 3’s anatomy fails on Stability’s insistence on filtering out adult content (often called “NSFW” content) from the SD3 training data that teaches the model how to generate images. “Believe it or not, heavily censoring a model also gets rid of human anatomy, so… that’s what happened,” wrote one Reddit user in the thread.

Basically, any time a user prompt homes in on a concept that isn’t represented well in the AI model’s training dataset, the image-synthesis model will confabulate its best interpretation of what the user is asking for. And sometimes that can be completely terrifying.

The release of Stable Diffusion 2.0 in 2022 suffered from similar problems in depicting humans well, and AI researchers soon discovered that censoring adult content that contains nudity can severely hamper an AI model’s ability to generate accurate human anatomy. At the time, Stability AI reversed course with SD 2.1 and SD XL, regaining some abilities lost by strongly filtering NSFW content.

Another issue that can occur during model pre-training is that sometimes the NSFW filter researchers use remove adult images from the dataset is too picky, accidentally removing images that might not be offensive and depriving the model of depictions of humans in certain situations. “[SD3] works fine as long as there are no humans in the picture, I think their improved nsfw filter for filtering training data decided anything humanoid is nsfw,” wrote one Redditor on the topic.

Using a free online demo of SD3 on Hugging Face, we ran prompts and saw similar results to those being reported by others. For example, the prompt “a man showing his hands” returned an image of a man holding up two giant-sized backward hands, although each hand at least had five fingers.

A SD3 Medium example we generated with the prompt “A woman lying on the beach.”
A SD3 Medium example we generated with the prompt “A man showing his hands.”

Stability AI
A SD3 Medium example we generated with the prompt “A woman showing her hands.”

Stability AI
A SD3 Medium example we generated with the prompt “a muscular barbarian with weapons beside a CRT television set, cinematic, 8K, studio lighting.”
A SD3 Medium example we generated with the prompt “A cat in a car holding a can of beer.”

Stability first announced Stable Diffusion 3 in February, and the company has planned to make it available in a variety of different model sizes. Today’s release is for the “Medium” version, which is a 2 billion-parameter model. In addition to the weights being available on Hugging Face, they are also available for experimentation through the company’s Stability Platform. The weights are available for download and use for free under a non-commercial license only.

Soon after its February announcement, delays in releasing the SD3 model weights inspired rumors that the release was being held back due to technical issues or mismanagement. Stability AI as a company fell into a tailspin recently with the resignation of its founder and CEO, Emad Mostaque, in March and then a series of layoffs. Just prior to that, three key engineers—Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz—left the company. And its troubles go back even farther, with news of the company’s dire financial position lingering since 2023.

To some Stable Diffusion fans, the failures with Stable Diffusion 3 Medium are a visual manifestation of the company’s mismanagement—and an obvious sign of things falling apart. Although the company has not filed for bankruptcy, some users made dark jokes about the possibility after seeing SD3 Medium:

“I guess now they can go bankrupt in a safe and ethically [sic] way, after all.”

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Stability announces Stable Diffusion 3, a next-gen AI image generator

Pics and it didn’t happen —

SD3 may bring DALL-E-like prompt fidelity to an open-weights image-synthesis model.

Benj Edwards – Feb 22, 2024 9: 28 pm UTC

Enlarge / Stable Diffusion 3 generation with the prompt: studio photograph closeup of a chameleon over a black background.

On Thursday, Stability AI announced Stable Diffusion 3, an open-weights next-generation image-synthesis model. It follows its predecessors by reportedly generating detailed, multi-subject images with improved quality and accuracy in text generation. The brief announcement was not accompanied by a public demo, but Stability is opening up a waitlist today for those who would like to try it.

Stability says that its Stable Diffusion 3 family of models (which takes text descriptions called “prompts” and turns them into matching images) range in size from 800 million to 8 billion parameters. The size range accommodates allowing different versions of the model to run locally on a variety of devices—from smartphones to servers. Parameter size roughly corresponds to model capability in terms of how much detail it can generate. Larger models also require more VRAM on GPU accelerators to run.

Since 2022, we’ve seen Stability launch a progression of AI image-generation models: Stable Diffusion 1.4, 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, XL, XL Turbo, and now 3. Stability has made a name for itself as providing a more open alternative to proprietary image-synthesis models like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, though not without controversy due to the use of copyrighted training data, bias, and the potential for abuse. (This has led to lawsuits that are unresolved.) Stable Diffusion models have been open-weights and source-available, which means the models can be run locally and fine-tuned to change their outputs.

Stable Diffusion 3 generation with the prompt: Epic anime artwork of a wizard atop a mountain at night casting a cosmic spell into the dark sky that says “Stable Diffusion 3” made out of colorful energy.
An AI-generated image of a grandma wearing a “Go big or go home sweatshirt” generated by Stable Diffusion 3.
Stable Diffusion 3 generation with the prompt: Three transparent glass bottles on a wooden table. The one on the left has red liquid and the number 1. The one in the middle has blue liquid and the number 2. The one on the right has green liquid and the number 3.
An AI-generated image created by Stable Diffusion 3.
Stable Diffusion 3 generation with the prompt: A horse balancing on top of a colorful ball in a field with green grass and a mountain in the background.
Stable Diffusion 3 generation with the prompt: Moody still life of assorted pumpkins.
Stable Diffusion 3 generation with the prompt: a painting of an astronaut riding a pig wearing a tutu holding a pink umbrella, on the ground next to the pig is a robin bird wearing a top hat, in the corner are the words “stable diffusion.”
Stable Diffusion 3 generation with the prompt: Resting on the kitchen table is an embroidered cloth with the text ‘good night’ and an embroidered baby tiger. Next to the cloth there is a lit candle. The lighting is dim and dramatic.
Stable Diffusion 3 generation with the prompt: Photo of an 90’s desktop computer on a work desk, on the computer screen it says “welcome”. On the wall in the background we see beautiful graffiti with the text “SD3” very large on the wall.

As far as tech improvements are concerned, Stability CEO Emad Mostaque wrote on X, “This uses a new type of diffusion transformer (similar to Sora) combined with flow matching and other improvements. This takes advantage of transformer improvements & can not only scale further but accept multimodal inputs.”

Like Mostaque said, the Stable Diffusion 3 family uses diffusion transformer architecture, which is a new way of creating images with AI that swaps out the usual image-building blocks (such as U-Net architecture) for a system that works on small pieces of the picture. The method was inspired by transformers, which are good at handling patterns and sequences. This approach not only scales up efficiently but also reportedly produces higher-quality images.

Stable Diffusion 3 also utilizes “flow matching,” which is a technique for creating AI models that can generate images by learning how to transition from random noise to a structured image smoothly. It does this without needing to simulate every step of the process, instead focusing on the overall direction or flow that the image creation should follow.

A comparison of outputs between OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion 3 with the prompt, — Enlarge / A comparison of outputs between OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion 3 with the prompt, “Night photo of a sports car with the text “SD3″ on the side, the car is on a race track at high speed, a huge road sign with the text ‘faster.'”

We do not have access to Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3), but from samples we found posted on Stability’s website and associated social media accounts, the generations appear roughly comparable to other state-of-the-art image-synthesis models at the moment, including the aforementioned DALL-E 3, Adobe Firefly, Imagine with Meta AI, Midjourney, and Google Imagen.

SD3 appears to handle text generation very well in the examples provided by others, which are potentially cherry-picked. Text generation was a particular weakness of earlier image-synthesis models, so an improvement to that capability in a free model is a big deal. Also, prompt fidelity (how closely it follows descriptions in prompts) seems to be similar to DALL-E 3, but we haven’t tested that ourselves yet.

While Stable Diffusion 3 isn’t widely available, Stability says that once testing is complete, its weights will be free to download and run locally. “This preview phase, as with previous models,” Stability writes, “is crucial for gathering insights to improve its performance and safety ahead of an open release.”

Stability has been experimenting with a variety of image-synthesis architectures recently. Aside from SDXL and SDXL Turbo, just last week, the company announced Stable Cascade, which uses a three-stage process for text-to-image synthesis.

Listing image by Emad Mostaque (Stability AI)