Timothy Broome

I love photography, art, I've worked 10 years in the TV Industry. So I've always had a passion for the making of images; lighting, colour theory, portrait photography. Therefore of all the uses of LLMs it was stable diffusion and PYTorch which got me really excited. Watching the first images emerge from random pixels in Foocus felt like pure magic.

As a technologist I loved diving into the computer science of how this works. Stable diffusion starts at these random pixels and uses a models training weights to gradually change these to converge on its calculated value of "correctness". For me the next stage in this journey was to create my own training weights from my own images to allow SD to create images with the likenesses of the people I know and love with endless possibilities for creativity.

At the time my wife and I were living at her family home in Puerto Rico. She needed professional profile pictures for work; a department store, stylist and photographer weren't readily available down the road. This felt like the first real use case. We were able to create images truly of her; trained on 20+ random smartphone pictures; but with perfect business attire, lighting etc.

This technology was significant enough that I didn't want to just make a hobby project. As an engineer I wanted to learn the craft of making this into a professional product that professionals could rely on and pay to use. This is the difference between "coding" and the craft of engineering.