Month: September 2022

Enlarge / Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was a cowboy? Stable Diffusion does. (credit: Benj Edwards / Stable Diffusion)

AI image generation is here in a big way. A newly released open source image synthesis model called Stable Diffusion allows anyone with a PC and a decent GPU to conjure up almost any visual reality they can imagine. It can imitate virtually any visual style, and if you feed it a descriptive phrase, the results appear on your screen like magic.

Some artists are delighted by the prospect, others aren't happy about it, and society at large still seems largely unaware of the rapidly evolving tech revolution taking place through communities on Twitter, Discord, and Github. Image synthesis arguably brings implications as big as the invention of the camera—or perhaps the creation of visual art itself. Even our sense of history might be at stake, depending on how things shake out. Either way, Stable Diffusion is leading a new wave of deep learning creative tools that are poised to revolutionize the creation of visual media.

The rise of deep learning image synthesis

Stable Diffusion is the brainchild of Emad Mostaque, a London-based former hedge fund manager whose aim is to bring novel applications of deep learning to the masses through his company, Stability AI. But the roots of modern image synthesis date back to 2014, and Stable Diffusion wasn't the first image synthesis model (ISM) to make waves this year.

Enlarge / Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera displays the Tarantula Nebula star-forming region in a new light. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team)

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope continues to provide astronomers with unprecedented views of the Universe.

On Tuesday, the space agency released a mosaic image that shows a panorama of star formation stretching across a staggering 340 light years. Astronomers call the main feature in this image 30 Doradus, but it has a catchier nickname—the Tarantula Nebula—due to its long, dusty filaments.

This stellar nursery is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the closest galaxies to our own Milky Way at a distance of 160,000 light years. The Tarantula Nebula was already a pretty spectacular feature in telescopes because it's the biggest and brightest stellar nebula in the local neighborhood of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.

Enlarge (credit: Helene Rogers/Alamy)

At first glance, even the name feels ambitious: Best of 2000 AD. How can anything, even a six-volume collection of anthologies running more than 200 pages each, live up to that ambition?

After all, it’s not as if 2000 AD is just any comic book series. Launched in 1977, the British weekly has become recognized as one of the most important science fiction titles in comics history—and not just for the characters and stories published, but also for the sheer volume of creative talent that has built reputations thanks to work published in the title. It was 2000 AD that teamed the Watchmen duo of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons for the first time and published important early work by the likes of comic book legend Grant Morrison, current Marvel mainstay Al Ewing, Mad Max: Fury Road writer and visual artist Brendan McCarthy, Gorillaz cocreator Jamie Hewlett, and many more. It’s something that’s been cited as a creative influence by musicians, movie directors, and novelists alike and a long-standing part of British pop culture for nearly half a century. 2000 AD is, bluntly, a big deal.

What is perhaps the most surprising thing about the new Best of series launching later this month is how successfully it manages to deliver on the promise of its title. A significant part of that success comes down to curation. While the six volumes in the collection haven’t been officially separated by theme or any specific criteria, they each have an individual identity that allows them to stand alone for readers looking to pick up just one book for a particular experience.

Enlarge / PRESS START (credit: Steam Deck HQ)

Those who have gotten their hands on the Steam Deck know the portable PC is a handy little emulation machine for the usual range of classic consoles. But the hardware's specific features also make it one of the easiest and most authentic ways to emulate dual-screen consoles like the Wii U and Nintendo DS/3DS lines.

True multi-screen emulation of these specific Nintendo consoles isn't an entirely new concept, of course. Hackers were splitting Nintendo DS emulation across two screens at least as far back as 2013, and Wii U emulator Cemu added support for a second "GamePad" window back in 2017 (before going open source and adding a native Linux version just recently).

But those kinds of solutions have been a bit awkward, often requiring either unwieldy hardware setups or compromises on some of the consoles' core features. The Steam Deck makes things a lot easier and more full-featured, as fan site Steam Deck HQ has described in some recent simple setup guides.