An open text-to-image model released in August 2022 by Stability AI with researchers at LMU Munich and Runway. Because its weights were public, artists could run and adapt it on their own machines.
For example, with Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst's project for the Whitney, it uses, I think, Stable Diffusion under the hood, but it's got this LoRA or fine-tuning that they did on it so that when you type fluffy bunny into the interface, it doesn't give you a fluffy bunny. It gives you Holly Herndon as a fluffy bunny.
Jon Ippolito, Preserving Digital Art: Regina Harsanyi, Jon Ippolito
I was interested mostly at the time in variational autoencoders, and that's a generative network that still exists now, kind of inside of models like Stable Diffusion.