How The Art-Generating AI of Stable Diffusion Works

It may surprise some to discover that the image creation part doesn’t work the way a human does. That is to say, it doesn’t begin with a blank canvas and build an image bit by bit from the ground up. It begins with a seed: a bunch of random noise. Noise gets subtracted in a series of steps that leave the result looking less like noise and more like an aesthetically pleasing and (ideally) coherent image.