Use React and the Stable Diffusion API to build a reactive AI application that generates images from user-submitted text.

In case you’ve been backpacking in the Himalayas for the last year, generative AI has recently become enormously popular. Text generators like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Bard are one type of generative AI model. Text-to-image generators are another. One of the leaders in the space is Stable Diffusion, an open source image generation AI system. We’ll use Stable Diffusion’s free trial API to build a React.js client that connects and interacts with the service.

Stable Diffusion is available from its GitHub repository. Several projects offer endpoints for interacting with hosted Stable Diffusion installs, so you can avoid having to set up and train the model yourself. One of the best interfaces to Stable Diffusion is the Stable Diffusion API, which offers a free trial. We’ll use the API to see how we can interact with Stable Diffusion in React, a front-end JavaScript library that is also free and open source. Now that we have React and Stable Diffusion set up, let’s start building a UI that will let us enter a text prompt, send it to the Stable Diffusion API endpoint, and display the resultant image. We’ll use a simple scrollable pane to show the list of generated images.