New AI tool aims to democratise high-res image generation


In the world of AI image generation, tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are holding the crown — and not simply because of their high-resolution performance. The training of these models requires such substantial investment and resources that it inevitably leads to centralised services and pay-per-use access.

A new AI tool developed by the University of Surrey aims to reverse this trend and democratise the technology, by opening up high-res image generation to a wider audience.

Dubbed DemoFusion, the model allows users to generate high-quality images without the need to subscribe to a service, or own a very powerful computer. In fact, the system only requires consumer-grade RTX 3090 GPU that can be found in any mid-range gaming PC or a Mac M1.

The AI is essentially a plug-and-play extension to the Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) open-source model, which generates images at a resolution of 1024×1024. DemoFusion enables 4x, 16x, or even higher increase in resolution — with a few simple lines of code and without any additional training. The only trade-off according to the team is “a little more patience.” We tried it at TNW and it’s about six minutes.

SDXL vs DemoFusion AI image generator
Credit: University of Surrey