DALL-E 2, OpenAI's powerful text-to-image AI system, can create photos in the style of cartoonists, 19th century daguerreotypists, stop-motion animators and more. But it has an important, artificial limitation: a filter that prevents it from creating images depicting public figures and content deemed too toxic.

Now an open source alternative to DALL-E 2 is on the cusp of being released, and it'll have no such filter.

London- and Los Altos-based startup Stability AI this week announced the release of a DALL-E 2-like system, Stable Diffusion, to just over a thousand researchers ahead of a public launch in the coming weeks. A collaboration between Stability AI, media creation company RunwayML, Heidelberg University researchers and the research groups EleutherAI and LAION, Stable Diffusion is designed to run on most high-end consumer hardware, generating 512x512-pixel images in just a few seconds given any text prompt.

Stable Diffusion sample outputs. Image Credits: Stability AI

"Stable Diffusion will allow both researchers and soon the public to run this under a range of conditions, democratizing image generation," Stability AI CEO and founder Emad Mostaque wrote in a blog post. "We look forward to the open ecosystem that will emerge around this and further models to truly explore the boundaries of latent space."

But Stable Diffusion's lack of safeguards compared to systems like DALL-E 2 poses tricky ethical questions for the AI community. Even if the results aren't perfectly convincing yet, making fake images of public figures opens a large can of worms. And making the raw components of the system freely available leaves the door open to bad actors who could train them on subjectively inappropriate content, like pornography and graphic violence.

Creating Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is the brainchild of Mostaque. Having graduated from Oxford with a Masters in mathematics and computer science, Mostaque served as an analyst at various hedge funds before shifting gears to more public-facing works. In 2019, he co-founded Symmitree, a project that aimed to reduce the cost of smartphones and internet access for people living in impoverished communities. And in 2020, Mostaque was the chief architect of Collective & Augmented Intelligence Against COVID-19, an alliance to help policymakers make decisions in the face of the pandemic by leveraging software.