Stable Diffusion Now Has Plugins for Blender, Photoshop, Krita, and GIMP

Some comments on the web suggest that digital artists have reached the end of the road. If generating art with artificial intelligence is good enough, end users will adopt this resource without thinking twice. But that apparent antagonism can turn into something more positive with the right tools, for example, Stable Diffusion plugins compatible with programs like Photoshop and Blender. Many are still in development, but the potential is incalculable.

The creation of art with artificial intelligence is advancing by leaps and bounds. Algorithms are becoming easier to use, and we already have the chance to install these models locally on our PCs. Now, the questions many online users are asking and repeating all point in the same direction: What will happen to the digital artist? If an algorithm can perform "creative jobs", what will be left for the rest?

Photoshop + Stable Diffusion = Alpaca

One of the plugins making the most noise in recent days is Alpaca, courtesy of the integration between Stable Diffusion and the very same Adobe Photoshop. A demo of this plugin inspired by Studio Ghibli's art blew up across Reddit, but I must also add that the chemical composition of a bottle of mineral water has more information than the official Alpaca page. All we can do there is sign up for the private beta. Patience.

Two plugins in Krita, and counting...

As its name suggests, Stable Diffusion Krita Plugin is one of the first adaptations to connect Stable Diffusion with the popular Krita editor. Its GitHub profile offers all the instructions needed for a proper installation, but there is no doubt that this is a work in progress, and anyone interested should take it slowly. Even so, its demo is impressive, generating additional details from a basic prompt. Another alternative is the Krita addon for Image AI Utils by Sergey Morozov, whose demonstration is in the shared video.

What about GIMP?

The Twitter user "nousr" shared a demo of Stable Diffusion working inside GIMP with Google Colab as backend, but the strangest thing is that he does not recommend following this route, or at least not with GIMP. The original plan was to create a plugin, but GIMP still depends on Python 2.7, and in "nousr"'s opinion that makes everything more difficult. Maybe in GIMP 3.0...?

Two options for Blender

The first is StablenderDiffusion by user "shellward" on GitHub, but its instructions are emptier than an ice cream tub at three in the morning in summer. Basically, the idea is to go to Blender's add-ons section and use the "install from file" option to load the .py that appears in the repository.

The second is CEB Stable Diffusion by Carlos Barreto, who took the trouble to publish a ten-minute YouTube tutorial describing the installation and general use of his plugin. The only warning is that "CEB" works locally, and you'll need a GPU with enough firepower.

In summary

Whether we like it or not, we are facing a new era of digital creativity. It's still too early to tell whether art with artificial intelligence will end up displacing digital artists, but the tools are multiplying, and what once seemed impossible is now only a sentence away.