Introduction to AI - where to start

[Creator13]

Hello, since there are more and more games where the steps, answers, pictures, characters are generated by AI, I would also like to learn.
The problem is that I haven't come across any AI that allows you to "learn" something before they start pulling money out of people.
Promptchan, SoulGen, CreateGirlz etc. all offer "free" trying, but it is not possible to even try something because it is limited to one, two try (and those are very limited) so you can´t really learn how it work.
Until now I was creating in DAZ3D and I have no problem to pay in future, but until I know how to do staff, spending money is nonsense.
I would like to convert my creation in DAZ3D into a more realistic form.
Any ideas? Thank you.

 

[Astcit]

If you mean AI as in Stable Diffusion, you don't have to pay anything to anyone. Same for LLMs (text) and so on.
If your computer can run DAZ3D, it can run SD offline locally and for free (I'm assuming you have a nvidia gpu, but it can also be done with amd gpus, it's just more complicated to setup).

For image generation (Stable Diffusion), I recommend starting with Auto1111 (

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). It's relatively very easy to install and use. You just have to follow the steps.
Then, with time, patience and a little better understanding, I would migrate to ComfyUI (

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). It's a lot more complicated, but way more fine control of what you're doing.

As for text AI (Large Language Models, or LLMs), I would start with LM Studio (

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). It's literally just a matter of downloading the file, a model inside the program when it opens, and using the AI for whatever you want it to do.
For more story driven or adventure focused AI prompting, I would then go to KoboldAI (

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). It's also a very easy single file setup, but using is a little less intuitive. But as LM Studio, it also has good guides and troubleshooting help.

For AMD gpus, there's forks of most of those I recommended but using Zluda and ROCm as CUDA replacements, giving mostly same performance as Nvidia gpus, given you have a good newish gpu. And no you don't need linux, both Zluda and ROCm forks already work extremelly well on windows.

 

[Creator13]

Hello, thank you for answer. I will try it. To be honest, I didn´t even know that it is possible, because I thought that AI need a lot of computing power.

 

[Gone405]

I will look into stable diffusion and slowly start learning it. My PC should be beefy enough to handle this. thanks for the links Astcit.

 

[Astcit]

Hello, thank you for answer. I will try it. To be honest, I didn´t even know that it is possible, because I thought that AI need a lot of computing power.

It does requires a lot of computing power. Not only cpu/gpu raw processing power, but lots and lots of RAM and VRAM.

For AI text (LLMs) you don't actually need too much, even 8GB of RAM PCs with no GPU can run it, but are the less "smart AI" models and it takes longer for the AI to answer.

For diffusion (SD) you do need a good GPU (with at least 8GB of VRAM) and 16GB of RAM. There does exist smaller less resource hungry models for SD on weak PCs (even notebooks and such), but they take really long times to make images (like minutes instead of seconds) and the quality is not nearly comparable to the "normal" models.

I'm not gonna lie, starting to experiment with AI content is easy, and as I said completely free. But reading a little to better understand how it all works and what are the tools available (and what they require) helps a lot.
Reading and learning about something before jumping heads in is always a good idea. And on this day and age we not only have blogs and articles teaching, but also videos and such. Of course there's also a lot of dumb people teaching things wrong (especially on youtube), but hey, that sadly applies to everything today. So it's always a good idea to read/watch from multiple different people to see if things are really how they are teaching.