I predicted back when they started backpedaling that there's a chance that sd1.4 or 1.5 will be the best available model to the general public, for a very long duration, because the backlash will force them to self-castrate themselves.
You can see nobody likes this new model in any of the stable diffusion communities. It's a big flop and for a good reason. The reason it was so
successful in the first place was because you could combine artist names to get the model to the outcome you want.
I'll again remind anyone who thinks they might want to use this to download a working version of SD now. They might break their own libraries in the future, and getting SD1.4 could be a real hassle in a year or so. Getting the right .ckpt file, which can have pickled python malware, is not so trivial, and this will get worse in time.
It's going to diverge into castrated official model that intentionally breaks the older models and older models from unofficial shady sources that might contain malware.
These models will always work best with open datasets and open platforms for this reason.
Social media/"AI ethics" pressure groups will eventually come from these organizations (see Meta's recent debacle with Galactica). Being an unknown org without these pressures was a big reason Stable Diffusion got so popular in the first place.
That's like saying that obtaining the On the Origin of Species or Linux kernel will be harder in future. If anything the SD weights will be increasingly ubiquitous as they start embedding it into consumer electronics.
As someone completely unfamiliar with SD but interested in playing around with it in the future, what exactly should I download, to have a fully local instance of 1.4 or 1.5?
I'm not comparing with the others because I don't have experience with them, but https://invoke-ai.github.io/InvokeAI/ is great, with an easy install and active development.
You can see nobody likes this new model in any of the stable diffusion communities. It's a big flop and for a good reason. The reason it was so successful in the first place was because you could combine artist names to get the model to the outcome you want.
I'll again remind anyone who thinks they might want to use this to download a working version of SD now. They might break their own libraries in the future, and getting SD1.4 could be a real hassle in a year or so. Getting the right .ckpt file, which can have pickled python malware, is not so trivial, and this will get worse in time.
It's going to diverge into castrated official model that intentionally breaks the older models and older models from unofficial shady sources that might contain malware.