AI Art

paused

Stable Diffusion running locally on a MacBook, driven from the command line.

Tech Stack

PythonPyTorchDiffusersStable Diffusion 2.1Apple Metal

TL;DR

Prompt in, picture out, nothing leaves the laptop.

generate.py
$ python generate.py \
"a lone astronaut standing
on the edge of a massive
crater on Mars, Earth visible
in the pink sky, cinematic
lighting, hyper detailed" \
--steps 50 --guidance 9
Using MPS (Apple Silicon)
Generating (50 steps)...
✓ Saved to output/

The prompt

An astronaut on the rim of a Mars crater under a pink sky, generated locally

The output

What it is
A Python script that runs Stable Diffusion on the MacBook. Pass a prompt, wait about 30 seconds, get an image.
Local
No cloud API, no subscription. The M3's GPU does the work through Metal Performance Shaders, in about 4GB of memory.
Why
A guinea pig for this site's /add-work and /log-work commands. About a tenth of the time went on the CLI, the rest on the work tracker.
Stack
Python, PyTorch and Hugging Face Diffusers.

Started August 2025.