A Comprehensive Guide to the Underlying Technology of AI Image Generation! A Plain-Language Explanation of the Principles Behind Midjourney, SD, and DALL‑E, and the Past and Present of AI Image Generation

🔥 Intro­duc­tion:

The recent pop­u­lar­i­ty of AI is unde­ni­able, and names like Mid­jour­ney, Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion, and DALL‑E 3 are now house­hold words. Are you also curi­ous about how these mag­i­cal AI draw­ing tools turn text into stun­ning images? Today, we'll use plain lan­guage to reveal the secrets behind AI image gen­er­a­tion and explore the past and present of AI draw­ing!

🤔 AI Image Generation, Where Did It Come From?

To talk about AI image gen­er­a­tion, we have to men­tion sev­er­al key mile­stones in its devel­op­ment his­to­ry:

1. Early Exploration: GAN and Deep Dream

2014: GAN (Gen­er­a­tive Adver­sar­i­al Net­work)Remem­ber GAN, which made AI draw­ing "show its first signs of bril­liance" in 2014? It's like two "debaters," one respon­si­ble for draw­ing (the gen­er­a­tor) and the oth­er for crit­i­ciz­ing (the dis­crim­i­na­tor). The draw­ing one tries des­per­ate­ly to make its draw­ings look more real, and the crit­i­ciz­ing one tries des­per­ate­ly to find flaws in the draw­ings. The two "love and kill each oth­er" in this way, and in the end, the lev­el of the draw­ing one gets high­er and high­er, and the things it draws are enough to be fake!

Midjourney's ear­ly ver­sions bor­rowed from the idea of GAN!

2015: Deep DreamGoogle's Deep Dream is more like an advanced fil­ter. It throws the image into a "kalei­do­scope" and then fran­ti­cal­ly "imag­ines" the image based on what it "sees". The result? Mmmm…you might see a lot of weird eyes and ani­mal faces…

Although a bit "mag­i­cal", Deep Dream is also a bold attempt at AI draw­ing!

2. Huge Breakthrough: DALL‑E Series

OpenAI's DALL‑E series is the "leader" in the AI image gen­er­a­tion world! Its biggest break­through is the real­iza­tion of the "text → image" leap!

• 2021: DALL‑E 1The core tech­nolo­gies of DALL‑E 1 are GPT‑3 and VAE.
  • GPT‑3 (Trans­former): Like a super "trans­la­tor", it is respon­si­ble for trans­lat­ing your text instruc­tions into "whis­pers" that AI can under­stand.
    
  • VAE (Vari­a­tion­al Autoen­coder): Respon­si­ble for turn­ing "whis­pers" into pic­tures. It first encodes and com­press­es the image, and then adds a nor­mal func­tion so that there are mul­ti­ple results to refer to when the image is decod­ed and restored.
    
• 2022: DALL‑E 2
  DALL‑E 2 has switched to more pow­er­ful "weapons": CLIP and Dif­fu­sion!
  • CLIP (Con­trastive Lan­guage-Image Pre-train­ing): This time, the trans­la­tor is direct­ly upgrad­ed to a "match­mak­er", which can quick­ly match the com­mon fea­tures of text and images.Dif­fu­sion (Dif­fu­sion Mod­el): This is the "new favorite" of AI draw­ing! It first adds "noise" to the image, and then "denois­es" it step by step to final­ly gen­er­ate a clear image.
    
• 2023: DALL‑E 3DALL‑E 3 inte­grates CLIP, VAE and Dif­fu­sion, and its capa­bil­i­ties are even bet­ter!

3. A Hundred Flowers Bloom: Midjourney and Stable Diffusion

• Mid­jour­neyMid­jour­ney is known for its unique artis­tic style, and it draws on the ideas of GAN and CLIP. It is easy to oper­ate and suit­able for novice users.
• Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion
  Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion is the "star" of the open source world. It is based on the Dif­fu­sion mod­el and pro­vides users with more con­trol, but it also tests the "tun­ing" abil­i­ty.

⚔️ Comparison of the Three Giants: Which is Better?

• Mid­jour­ney: Stun­ning visu­al effects, but coher­ence is some­times lack­ing.
• DALL‑E 3: Bet­ter coher­ence, but the visu­al effects may be slight­ly infe­ri­or.
• Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion: An all-rounder with the strongest con­trol­la­bil­i­ty, but also the high­est dif­fi­cul­ty to get start­ed.

🚀 Future Outlook

AI image gen­er­a­tion tech­nol­o­gy is still devel­op­ing rapid­ly. In the future, we can expect:

• High­er def­i­n­i­tion and more real­is­tic images
• More per­son­al­ized and con­trol­lable cre­ation
• Wider appli­ca­tion sce­nar­ios (games, design, edu­ca­tion…)

AI image gen­er­a­tion has a bright future!

I hope this "plain lan­guage" pop­u­lar sci­ence can give you a clear­er under­stand­ing of the under­ly­ing tech­nol­o­gy of AI image gen­er­a­tion. If you find it use­ful, don't for­get to like, share, and fol­low!