On fal, it takes less than a second many times.

https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/z-image/turbo/api

Couple that with the LoRA, in about 3 seconds you can generate completely personalized images.

The speed alone is a big factor but if you put the model side by side with seedream and nanobanana and other models it's definitely in the top 5 and that's killer combo imho.

So does this finally replace SDXL?

Is Flux 1/2/Kontext left in the dust by the Z Image and Qwen combo?

It's interesting the handsome guy is literally Tony Leung Chiu-wai, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0504897/, not even modified

The model is uncensored, so will probably suite that target market admirably.

They're correct. This tech, like much before it, is being driven by the base desires of extremely smart young men.

Please write what you mean instead of making veiled implications. What is the point of beating around the bush here?

It's not clear to me what you mean either, especially since female models are overwhelmingly more popular in general[1].

[1]: "Female models make up about 70% of the modeling industry workforce worldwide" https://zipdo.co/modeling-industry-statistics/

The ratio of naked female loras compared to naked male loras, or even non-porn loras, on civitai is at least 20 to 1. This shouldn't be surprising.

But this is a CCP model, would it refuse to generate Xi?

If you don't know anything about AI in terms of how these models are run, comfyui's macos version is probably the easiset to use. There is already a Z-Image workflow that you can get and comfyui will get all the models you need and get it work together. Can expect decent speed

This is early days, too. We're probably going to get better at this across more domains.

Local AI will eventually be booming. It'll be more configurable, adaptable, hackable. "Free". And private.

Crude APIs can only get you so far.

I'm in favor of intelligent models like Nano Banana over ComfyUI messes (the future is the model, not the node graph).

I still think we need the ability to inject control layers and have full access to the model, because we lose too much utility by not having it.

I think we'll eventually get Nano Banana Pro smarts slimmed down and running on a local machine.

I follow an author who publishes online on places like Scribblehub and has a modestly successful Patreon. Over the years he has spent probably tens of thousands of dollars on commissioned art for his stories, and he's still spending heavily on that. But as image models have gotten better this has increasingly been supplemented with AI-images for things that are worth a couple dollars to get right with AI, but not a couple hundred to get a human artist to do them

Roughly speaking the art seems to have three main functions:

1. promote the story to outsiders: this only works with human-made art

2. enhance the story for existing readers: AI helps here, but is contentious

3. motivate and inspire the author: works great with AI. The ease of exploration and pseudo-random permutations in the results are very useful properties here that you don't get from regular art

By now the author even has an agreement with an artist he frequently commissions that he can use his style in AI art in return for a small "royalty" payment for every such image that gets published in one of his stories. A solution driven both by the author's conscience and by the demands of the readers

Some ideas for your consideration:

- Illustrating blog posts, articles, etc.

- A creativity tool for kids (and adults; consider memes).

- Generating ads. (Consider artisan production and specialized venues.)

- Generating assets for games and similar, such as backdrops and textures.

Like any tool, it takes certain skill to use, and the ability to understand the results.

Dying businesses like newspapers and local banks, who use it to save the money they used to spend on shutterstock images? That’s where I’ve seen it at least. Replacing one useless filler with another.

I would say there's isn't an equivalent. Some people will probably tell you ComfyUI - you can expose workflows via API endpoints and parameterize them. This is how e.g. Krita AI Diffusion uses a ComfyUI backend.

For various reasons, I doubt there are any large scale SaaS-style providers operating this in production today.

Even on my 4080 it's extremely fast, it takes ~15 seconds per image.

Apparently - https://github.com/ivanfioravanti/z-image-mps

Supports MPS (Metal Performance Shaders). Using something that skips Python entirely along with a mlx or gguf converted model file (if one exists) will likely be even faster.

It's working for me - it does max out my 64GB though.