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These recent years have been characterized by a strong movement of recentralization towards platforms and a nearly total monopoly over the infrastructure of large-scale computation. This is also true for flagship products of image generation software such as Dall-e or Adobe Firefly. However, the relentless work of communities of developers, enthusiasts and activists has helped create a nascent alternative made of disparate pieces of software, material resources, documentation, forums and counter-lobbies.

For a while, to inspect the state of the art AI models required the permission of software giants under restrictive conditions, the situation is now changing as the alliance between a large series of smaller actors has reached a critical threshold. The Stable Diffusion ecosystem is a paradigmatic example. In this ecosystem, the image acts as a network that binds together software, interfaces and datasets as well as social formations and communities in practices of curation, annotation, prompting, description, observation, rating and censorship. 

During the session, facilitated by Nicolas Maleve, we will work together on the elaboration of a diagram that follows these actors and their practices. We have coffee/tea and sweets.