Stable Diffusion (SD) is the most flexible, and open way to generate AI artwork, simply because it can be installed locally - compared to other solutions like artbreeder, or midJourney which are proprietary version - stable diffusion is open for the public.
The hardware requirements though is quite demanding, as you will need a recent computer with a modern AMD or Intel processor, 16 GB of RAM, a good video card like NVIDIA RTX GPU (8 GB of memory), and a minimum of 15 GB of free storage space available.
You could theoretically install SD into a virtual machine, but then it will run in a lower speed (not being able to access the video card), generating a simple image of 512x512 will take up to 30mn.
The installer (tested and working as of Dec, 26 2022) is located here (for Linux and Windows) the installation process is pretty long, Python 3 will be installed, then many other python packages...
Once the download is finished, access the extracted zip file and run ./start.sh (which is the way you will later run the SD as well).
In case you get errors, most of the scenarios are covered on this page
https://github.com/cmdr2/stable-diffusion-ui/wiki/Troubleshooting
As for example, I had this scenario:
- the installation went fine, and once it was ended, the internet browser popped up with the address localhost:9000 and then this error would occur:
Killed uvicorn server:app --app-dir ... --port 9000 --host 0.0.0.0
The reason I had this error was that my setup for the virtual machine had too little memory (4GB), and unless I setup up to 12GB that error would appear.