Equal Code: Stable Diffusion
One simple way that we're taking advantage of AI to help ourselves craft this very blog post series.
AI is the hot topic in the tech world right now. It's changing people's jobs left, right and center. Equal Care is no different! Here's one simple way that we're taking advantage of AI to help ourselves craft this very blog post series.
Images in online content
Try a quick search for "the effect of images in blogs" and be astounded by the reams of articles that espouse the same thing: articles with images do better than those without. Whilst many of these articles are promotional content for other blogs, communicating visually has been studied academically for a long time and the consensus is clear: better visuals means higher information retention and a larger chance that someone will share your content with others.
Choosing the right images is hard. For the Equal Code series, we primarily use them to catch the eye on social media and set the theme for the article. The topics that we talk about aren't likely candidates for stock photos and often concern abstract ideas like software.
Instead of trawling image repositories for hours, we use AI to help us and generate the images specific to each blog post.
Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion is an AI model that turns text into images. It took the online world by storm when stability.ai released it last year and continues to be improved with the help of a vibrant community.
Stability AI offer Dream Studio, a nice interface to machines that run the Stable Diffusion model for you. You give it text, it gives you back images. Exactly what we need! Even better, they offer you free credits when you sign up that are enough to generate somewhere between 1000 and 10 images (depending on the quality you require).
Examples
Let's have a look at some of the things that we've whipped up.
For our our previous post, cypher-template-strings
A computer-generated graph of nodes and edges. Colorful watercolour. Professional high-quality.
A monthly calendar repeated in a regular grid. Colorful watercolor painting. Professional high quality.
Prompt engineering
The term "prompt engineering" has emerged for the skill required to write just the right prompt for the computer to achieve your desired outcome. Within the Dream Studio interface is an excellent guide to prompt engineering that covers all the basics and more. I would highly recommend giving it a read if you start to play around with generating images.
You can help Equal Care
So far, I've not been able to generate excellent images of people giving and receiving care and support. Real people are usually, and very understandably, not willing to share photos of themselves being cared for. Using AI-generated images would unlock a significant new avenue for our visual identity. If you want to try out Stable Diffusion and can't think of something to create: give that a go! Send them to marc@equalcare.coop