Women Who Code East Bay had their first meetup since the start of the COVID lockdown, and to kick things off it was at our very own SudoRoom. As far as I know it’s the first time I’ve heard of a Women Who Code event happening at a hackerspace, I hope we can start a trend.
The workshop “AI Unleashed” explored the open-source generative artificial intelligence model Stable Diffusion to create images from text prompts. Since it was open source, people could download the model to their own computer and run as many image prompts as they’d like for free. Thanks so much to our fearless leader Lianna for guiding everyone along the way!
A lot of the the event was about demystifying generative artificial intelligence. There’s so much new stuff going on and people tend to get directed to commercial sites with great UX that obscure a lot of the technical details. So we wanted to make people comfortable with being able to install their own models instead of just going to a commercial website first thing. You know, like teaching people how to fish instead of just dropping a fish on their plate!
The installation focused on getting people comfortable going out on the internet to websites like Hugging Face, hunting down cool open source models, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each one, and learning how to run the web interface from the command line. The entire time there was a welcoming, supportive environment of people helping each other out just in case they got stuck.
By the end of the installfest members were already spinning out art on their laptops using Stable Diffusion:
We’re looking forward to more collaborations with Women Who Code East Bay.
If you have any office space and would like to sponsor the Women Who Code East meetups at your space or company, fill out this form or email them at east bay (at sign) womenwhocode.com
