Mann-E (Persian: مانی) is an art generator model based on the weights of Stable Diffusion 1.5 and data gathered from artistic material available on Pinterest. This model is a tool to help people make artistic material as easy as possible with ideas they have in their minds.
History of Mann-E
Mann-E has been started as a hobby project by Muhammadreza Haghiri (the founder of Open Cognitives) based on VQGAN models. This was a hobby until the release of the Stable Diffusion and later, it became more serious. It basically is the reason of starting a whole new version of web, based around generative artificial intelligence tools. Mann-E had a big role in the Iranian startup ecosystem, specially crypto-exchange companies and NFT platforms who all went after this model to make benefits of their own.
But the ambitions and intentions behind this model was bigger than they thought, it wasn’t a tool to keep your audience or customers entertained, it is a tool to revolutionize the internet. However, it is not the big thing alone and it needs to be mixed with other ideas of Web 4.0.
How can we use Mann-E?
Mann-E is available through Google Colab notebooks, and also there is a guide on huggingface page of the model. Since this model is based on Stable Diffusion, there is huge support by many Stable Diffusion libraries out there.
What makes Mann-E different?
The whole idea of generating images with the help of AI is nothing new. Since there was definition of the Generative Adversarial Neural Network or GANN for short, there was the definition of the AI image generators. There also were tools such as CLIP to make sure how exactly your images match your prompts. In late 2020 and early 2021, there was somehow a burst in the whole idea of AI art generator with Dall-E 2 introduced by OpenAI.
Later there were websites and mobile apps which offered very cool styles or content and the climax somehow reached by the initial release of Stable Diffusion in summer 2022. Mann-E is there to just be a creativity enhancing tool, a virtual assistant for artists, designers, etc.
Since the web 4.0 idea is here to help us have a better online experience, it is important to have tools to enhance our creativity, such as art generators or intelligent bots. Mann-E is one of many web 4.0 tools!