We need a new logo

Stable Diffusion is the latest in a quick succession of releases of AI art tools. DALL-E by OpenAI kicked off interest in the space and showed everyone what was possible. Then DALL-E 2 came out in beta and it was a step change in quality: good enough to actually replace a human designer on some tasks for the first time. Unexpectedly given that DALL-E 2 looked like magic, competitors quickly arose in Midjourney and Craiyon (initially called DALL-E Mini), which grew to millions of members from all the people who couldn’t get DALL-E access. Early adopters posted amazing photos generated by AI on social media, which drove even more interest in this space, once people could see for themselves what was suddenly possible.

Then right after OpenAI released pricing for DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion was released, a completely open-source and free model, “made for the people, by the people”, as it said on the stability.ai website. The sudden emergence of a free tool you can run in your browser with just a little coding knowledge has exploded interest in the industry, leading to a flourishing of innovation and creativity that promises to completely upend the creative industries. People are learning ‘prompt engineering’ to figure out how to create good images, and building tools that allow even more advanced uses of these AI models.

Most people still aren’t aware of just how good these tools can be, or how accessible they are to use, so the shift won’t happen overnight. But as an early adopter of these tools you can learn how to work with these tools to solve design problems like creating a new logo, saving you thousands of dollars on hiring a human designer. Even if you do go down the human path, having an almost finished product to show them that matches your vision is infinitely better than trying to describe what you want, and takes 10x less work for both sides.