I’ve written a fair bit about language models of late. This is a language blog, after all! But creating resources is about other visual elements, too. And just as you can run off text from local generative AI, you can create images locally, too.

For working on a computer, ComfyUI is a good bet. It’s a graphical dashboard for creating AI art with a huge array of customisation options. The fully-featuredness of it, admittedly, makes it a complex first intro to image generation. It’s interface, which takes a pipeline / modular format, takes a bit of getting used to. But it also comes with pre-defined workflows that mean you can just open it, prompt and go. There’s also a wide, active community that supports in online, so there’s plenty of help available.

Generate images locally – the ComfyUI interface

At the more user-friendly end of it is Draw Things for Apple machines (unfortunately no Android yet). With a user interface much closer to art packages you’ll recognise, Draw Things allows you to download different models and prompt locally – and is available as an iOS app too. Obviously there’s a lot going on when you generate images, so it slugs along at quite a modest trot on my two-year-old iPad. But it gives you so much access to the buttons and knobs to tweak that it’s a great way to learn more about the generation process. Like ComfyUI, its complexity – once you get your head round it – actually teaches you a lot about image generation.

Of all the benefits of these apps, perhaps the greatest is again the environmental. You could fire up a browser and prompt one of the behemoths. But why crank up the heat on a distant data centre machine, when you can run locally? Many commercial generative models are far too powerful for what most people need.

Save power, and prompt locally. It’s more fun!