Stable Diffusion Powered by Intel® Arc™, Using GIMP
You’ve probably heard recent news around AI, and wondered if it pertains to anything you do, has any bearing on your computer hardware, or if it’s even accessible without some costly subscription service. Well, you might be surprised to learn, it may have a lot to do with things you want to do, can involve your own PC including especially your Intel Arc GPU, and can be freely accessible to you.
In this article I go over some of the context regarding the excitement around AI, the value and trend of AI running on personal computers, and show you how you can do this using GIMP, a popular open source tool for image editing.
What’s the AI excitement?
Recently just within the last 6 months a number of software libraries and services have been directly made available to developers and end users to take advantage of AI software, at a level we had not seen before. These services have been in 2 categories: AI Text to Image creation like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, where you can describe a picture and then AI will produce that image, and AI chat bots like ChatGPT where you can get answers on all sorts of topics, through natural language and communication.
How does my PC fit into this?
For many years advanced AI like this was something that happened in datacenters, and still does as those systems have the capacity to inference out these compute intensive algorithms. However modern PCs, especially gaming systems, are very powerful computers. And with recent advancements in these AI frameworks and libraries, they are very capable of running these workloads. As well, applications that can take advantage of these new AI features are often locally run PC applications such as; image editors, video editors, 3D editors, render engines, presentation software, or essentially anything where you are arranging, compositing, and editing pixels and text on screen. Thus, we are seeing a surge in AI powered add-on features in the types of software you might run daily, including a program called GIMP.
Examples and Use Cases:
Below are a few examples of images created in GIMP and powered by OpenVINO and rendered using an Intel Arc GPU. These images took seconds to create based on the text prompts provided. These examples demonstrate how your PC powered with AI can be an easy and accessible tool to inspire or move a creative project forward. This is a small sampling of what is possible. The output is only bound by your imagination and time.
Interior Design Ideas: Generate room décor ideas, inspiration for furniture styles, or get looks on a modern color palette for your own living room.
Prompt: “An award-winning interior design of a modern family room, taken with wide angle 28mm lens, dramatically lit”
Character Design: Generate concepts for a robot design for your video game, research period accurate clothes for cosplay.
Prompt: “a portrait of a robot from a 1940s horror film, taken with a 50mm lens at a film studio sound stage”
Prompt: “A historically accurate Viking, detailed clothes. Photo take on location in the Alps”
Prompt Crafting: When using AI text to image tools you will find that you are acting as a director and helping guide the AI toward an image you desire. How you describe the image is very important to getting a desired result. This is a skill that is easily learned, and there are plenty of YouTube videos on the topic where you can get up to speed.
- Be descriptive like an author describing a character or scene to a reader: Consider things like the era or period the image or subject of the image should be in, describe the the location or scene, and colors or details that should be in the image.
- You’ll notice the prompts above provide information like camera lens, environment, and lighting information. This kind of information helps direct the AI to produce something that looks like a photograph. If you prompted “photo of a Viking” then it is possible you might get wall with a framed picture of a cartoon Viking.
- If you do wish to focus on a subject a better phrasing is “portrait of…”.
- When possible, describe the age, and other details that matter.
- And finally, like asking a genie for wishes, think about how it could go wrong, how your language might be misinterpreted ie “photographed using…” vs “photo of…”.
Fortunately, you are not limited to 3 prompts. With this powered by your own PC, you get as many prompt attempts as you want.
GIMP with OpenVINO Plug-ins
If you are not familiar with GIMP it is a free open-source image editor. It has been around for many years and has many of the features, and tools you’d get out of professional commercial image editing software. As an open software solution there are many developers who add plug-ins to GIMP extending its capabilities beyond the source code base. As an image editor, GIMP is an ideal software tool to include these new AI tools. The Intel OpenVINO plugins for GIMP include the following (source) :
Image Generator Plugin with Stable Diffusion: Generate unique images using a text prompt.
Super Resolution Plugin: Upscale images up to 4X resolution.
Symantic Segmentation: Automate masking of foreground objects in a photo.
Inpainting Plugin: Paint out objects from a photo.
Style Transfer: Apply various artistic styles to an image.
OpenVINO and Intel Arc
OpenVINO is computer vision framework from Intel that is powering these plug-ins. It allows developers to have one code base leveraging common computer vision and AI frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, ONNX, etc; where they can then take advantage of various hardware architectures and processors with optimized performance. In other words, an OpenVINO powered AI application may take advantage of a CPU on a laptop or small form factor PC, then take advantage of a GPU like the Intel Arc A770 Graphics card on a gaming PC, or a Xeon CPU, a VPU, or an FPGA if run in the data center.
How to Install
Unlike many text to image AI solutions, GIMP and this plug-in are freely accessible for you to download and install. I have pinned a thread on this topic in the Intel Insider Discord Community #Creator Channel. I recommend you go there, to get the latest instructions, and updates on this. Prerequisites for installation are having GIT desktop and PyTorch installed on the Discord version. Prerequisites for installation of GitHub desktop and PyTorch are posted in the Discord instructions.
- Instructions on Intel Insiders Discord (end user friendly, but you will need to join the server, and accept the rules before you can read. We welcome you to join)
- Instructions from GitHub (written more for developers with developer environments in mind)
Join us on Insiders Discord
Bob Duffy
April 4, 2023
Notices and Disclaimers
Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more on the Performance Index site.
Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available updates. See backup for configuration details. No product or component can be absolutely secure.
Your costs and results may vary.
Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation.
Stable Diffusion’s data model is governed by the Creative ML Open Rail M license, which is not an open source license. https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion. Users are responsible for their own assessment whether their proposed use of the project code and model would be governed by and permissible under this license.
© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, Arc, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
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