Stable Diffusion tutorial: How to make an AI art with QR code

AI art is improving!

AI art is getting increasingly popular, but despite its visual aspect, there are not many options for how you can utilize it. Of course, you can adopt it into your business Social Medias or blogposts to improve the user experience of interacting with your content or to make it more eye-catching, but… what else you can do with it? Of course, we saw trending videos of Balenciaga, a great example of viral marketing, but what else?

Sure, there are Tik-Tok trends with video transforming into AI-generated ones, but I want to focus more on text-to-image and image-to-image generation. Of course, the best examples I know for using text-to-image generation are for interior design or any other used for health-related fields.

But what about other industries? Well, last week I saw on reddit an excellent new technique of generating AI art which might be really useful for brand communication or even merch production - a new way to utilize QR codes, which are… not that popular.

So without any further ado, let’s learn how to generate AI art with a readable QR code!

Let’s do it!

Okay, for this tutorial you will learn how to make AI art with a readable QR code with Stable Diffusion WebUI. In the future, I will write a tutorial on how to make one with Google Colab, but not today!

1. Download and install Stable Diffusion WebUI

So, first, download the Stable Diffusion WebUI repo from Automatic1111 github and install it following the instruction in the link.

2. We need also ControlNet extension

As you you have installed the WebUI, go to the “extensions tabs” and then to the “available” tab. Find “ControlNet”, click “install” and then restart your WebUI.

Now, as you go to the bottom of the page you should see “controlnet” section.

If you can't see them go to the “settings” tab on the top of the page, then find “ControlNet” on the left and click on it.

You will see “Multi ControlNet: Max models amount”, drag it into position “2” and restart.

3. Let’s generate a QR code

We won't use AI to generate a QR code, but we will use an existing one as an input image. There are many free websites, I am using this one and you can use which one you prefer. Choose “error correction level:L” and image size 250x250 and download the generated image.

4. Download 2 models

Download those 2 models:
From this link download “control_v11p_sd15_lineart.pth”

And from this one “control_v1p_sd15_brightness.safetensors”

And install them.

5. Everything’s set up, let's generate!

You remember, that we needed to have 2 control net windows. So we will need to upload our QR codes into both “controlNet Unit 0” and “controlNet Unit 1” tabs, and in each of them tag the field “enable”.

Now for both of them choose preprocessor “inpaint_global_harmonious” and for the first one choose Model “control_v11p_sd15_lineart.pth” and for the second one “control_v1p_sd15_brightness.safetensors”

For the first one (the one with control_v1p_sd15_brightness.safetensors model), choose Control weight 0.35, Starting Control Step 0 and Ending control Step 1.

For the second one (the one with control_v11p_sd15_lineart.pth model), choose Control weight 0.65, Starting Control Step 0.35 and Ending control Step 0.75..

Change the sampling method to “DPM++2M Karras” or “Euler A”.

Choose the “text2img” tab, insert your prompt (and negative one), press generate and… here you are :)

Summary!

So as you saw it’s not that hard and you can play a lot with it! Noone before thought about and now the QR codes are having a second life, so why wouldn't you come up with a new solution using Stable Diffusion or any other AI API?

And why not make it happen during one of lablab.ai’s AI Hackathons? It’s that simple - just identify the problem and build a solution to it using AI.

I hope you liked the tutorial, share in our discord your AI artworks and if you want to learn more see our other Stable Diffusion tutorials.

Marek Mardosewicz, Senior performance marketing specialist at NeNative.