SDXL is in roughly the same ballpark as MJ 5 quality-wise, but the main value is in the array of tooling immediately available for it, and the license. You can fine-tune it on your own pictures, use higher order input (not just text), and daisy-chain various non-imagegen models and algorithms (object/feature segmentation, depth detection, processing, subject control etc) to produce complex images, either procedural or one-off. It's all experimental and very improvised, but is starting to look like a very technical CGI field separate from the classic 3D CGI.
For bland stock photos and other "general-purpose" image generation, DALLE-2/Bing/Adobe etc are... the okayest. SD (with just standard model weights) is particularly weak here because of the small model size.
If you want to get arty, then state of the art for out-of-the-box typing in a prompt and clicking "generate" is probably MidJourney.
But if you're willing to spend some more time playing around with the open-source tooling, community finetunes, model augmentations (LyCORIS, etc), SD is probably going to get you the farthest.
> Also what are the most common use cases for image generation?
By sheer number of image generations? Take a guess...
SDXL 0.9 should be the state-of-the-art image generation model (in the open). It generates at 1024x1024 large resolution, with high coherency and good selection of styles out of box. It also has reasonable text-understanding comparing to other models.
That has been said, based on the configurations of these models, we are far from saturating what the best model can do. The problem is, FID is terrible metrics to evaluating these models so like LLM, we are a bit clueless about how to evaluate them now.
I overspoke. FID is a fine metrics to observe the training progress of your own model. And it correlates well with some coherency issues of generative models. But for cross model comparisons, especially for models that generally do well under FID, it is not discriminative enough to separate better / good.
I don't know what the use case is for other people is, but I've been playing around with book covers. This one took about two weeks, but it was my first real try and I was still learning how. Composition is a little off. The one I'm working on now is going faster (and better).
I've found that I rarely get a usable image completely as-is. It might take 5 or 10 generations to find something sort of ok, and even then I end up erasing the bad parts and letting it in-paint (which again takes multiple attempts). The T-rex had like 7 legs and two jaws, but was otherwise close to what I wanted... just keep erasing extra body parts until the in-painter finally takes a hint.
I was also going to do a few book covers for some Babylon 5 books, but it does so bad on celebrity faces. Looked like Koenig's mutant love child with Ernest Borgnine. Dunno what to do about that. I keep wondering if I shouldn't spend the next 10 years putting together my own training set of fantasy and science fiction art.
Would someone be kind to explain what the current state of the art in image generation is (how does this compare to Midjourney and others)?
How do open source models stack up?
Also what are the most common use cases for image generation?