And as if I I needed one more reason to leave Adobe…

InvokeAI, who’s one of the leading and top-quality Stable Diffusion frontends, was aquired by Adobe.

Invoke comes in two flavors: the cloud-based subscription-based, competing with the likes of DALL-E, Gemini, Midjourney, etc, and the open-source community version. I’ve been using the open source version for a while.

There are the usual empty promises that the open-source version will live on, but with Adobe leading the core team, it means just a fraction of the original creators behind Invoke will stay, and the product will quickly fall far behind to rot in the dust. Unlike other frontends like Automatic1111 and ComfyUI, Invoke offered a polished UI with advanced drawing features, including a launcher that made installing and upgrading the product a breeze, and I’m sad to see it go.

For me, AI projects that utilize users' computers instead of corporations like Adobe are important. Instead of paying for companies that don’t respect their users' privacy and artists' work, it’s up to the individual user to decide what to use and how to use it. It offers a level of control that the likes of Google and Adobe would never allow. Unfortunately, most non-tech folks are not aware of this side of machine learning and never will.