Image generation

Every small business needs pictures and almost nobody has a budget for them. A portrait for the about page, a headshot with the kitchen taken out behind it, a logo, something to put on a post. The usual answers are a photographer, a stock library, or a subscription that charges per picture.

The interesting part is not that a model can draw. It is that the tool doing the work can be downloaded onto your own computer, run there for nothing, and asked the same question twenty times.

What comes out of a session

A psychologist in Budapest finished her first session with a cut-out portrait of herself, background removed, in twenty versions to choose from. The agent picked the tool, installed it, and ran it locally in a second terminal tab while the first one was still busy with something else. She came back to the same tool two days later when the site needed the picture.

What it costs

• Running it on your machine: nothing. The tool is free, it downloads once, and the twentieth attempt costs exactly what the first one did.
• Running it through a hosted model: a slice of your monthly quota per picture, which is what makes people ask for one and settle.

That difference is the whole reason it is worth setting up locally. The moment a picture is free to retry, you stop describing what you want and start picking.

What goes wrong

The background is the hard part, not the person. Cutting somebody out of a photograph is where the result is won or lost, and it is also where a bad attempt is obvious at a glance. Look at it at the size it will actually be used.

Asking for one version wastes the advantage. For anything you have to look at to judge, ask for a batch and pick. Describing a picture well enough to get it right first time is harder than looking at twenty.

A generated picture of a real person is still a picture of a real person. Whether it goes on their site is their call, not the tool’s.

What you are not getting

A photographer, and not a designer either. What you get is the unglamorous half solved: a picture that is the right shape, with the right thing in it, that you did not have to wait a week or pay four hundred dollars for.