You know AI is about to go mainstream when influencers start posting their Stable Diffusion-generated avatars to Instagram.

What’s great about being in tech is that sometimes, not often, nerdy things become cool, and we get to say we knew about them first. If anyone’s even paying attention by then. Good thing we have receipts. 

If you’re a long-time lurker, you’ll know generative AI has been the talk of the town all year long, thanks to OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. But it’s just starting to spread outside tech Twitter, founders, and startup folks. Lensa AI seems to be the catalyst.

Who was first? Hard to tell. While there’s an ongoing heated debate happening on Twitter around this, one of the first ones we saw here on Product Hunt was Astria, in late October, followed by Avatar AI and Profile Picture AI. 

Then how did Lensa become so popular? We have to remember that Lensa’s not a new product by any means. In fact, we first saw it launch about 4 years ago as part of a bigger project called Prisma, which launched 2 years prior to that, as an AI that turns pictures into artwork. While some say that a smart distribution plan, years of grinding, and a mobile-first experience led to widespread adoption, others argue that it’s the ads the team’s been running as well as the fact that being VC-backed allowed them to sell images at a lower price.

The bottom line: It’s an exciting time to be in tech, and whether we get the credit for knowing about cartoonish avatars first or not, we’re just happy to witness it. As for which tools to use, check out all of them and decide which backstory speaks to you the most. 

Keep in mind Stable Diffusion is an open-source (free) deep learning model that can be run locally on your computer. So if you’re on a budget, want to get your hands a little dirty, and have enough GPU, go for it. 

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