The rapid emergence of new AI tools, especially in the consumer-driven market, has brought Gen AI (or generative artificial intelligence) to the forefront.
If you noticed, most of these tools are open source. This allows everyone to experiment with models, improve them through contributions, and even develop new models based on existing published work.
Of course, openness promotes healthy collaboration and innovation in the field of AI.
One such example is Stable broadcast which is primarily a text-to-image AI model that allows users to create stunning images with a prompt. Since its public release in 2022, several open source projects and models have been created based on Stable Diffusion for various use cases.
Here, let me highlight one such interesting open source project: Instant ID.
InstantID allows users to generate personalized images in different styles using a person’s face as a reference.
In other words, it allows you to create a digital avatar of yourself.
It tries to preserve the facial identity of the reference face during image generation, while keeping the image style in mind.
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Typically, an AI model needs to be trained on a dataset of a person’s face to achieve high likability. However, this approach requires additional resources and computational time and is not feasible for everyone.
InstantID intends to remove this approach and produce quality images using a single person’s face and a personalization prompt as inputs. If you’re not satisfied with the results, InstantID also allows users to upload additional reference images to improve facial identity.
For more controlled generation like assigning a particular human pose, InstantID also supports ControlNet which is another cool open source model that tweaks the generation by adding additional conditions in Stable Diffusion.
Of course, there could have been other similar attempts like InstantID. But I found this particularly intriguing.
For technically inclined readers, you can refer to the official research paper for detailed information on how the model works.
How to try it?
You can check out the official Huggingface demo to experience the model.
If you are familiar with Python and Stable Diffusion, the project GitHub repository includes documentation to guide you in implementing and testing the project yourself.
💬Open source AI tools like InstantID open up exciting possibilities for various use cases. But at the same time, these tools can be misused for malicious purposes, as recent news has shown. What do you think ?
