Everyone wants to get into AI imaging, but if you’re intimidated by the existing options based on Stable Diffusion, including Midjourney’s Discord bot, then you’re in luck: Diffusion Bee is a simple Mac program that lets you use an open source AI imaging framework with everything needed to generate your own images from text prompts.
Developed by Divam Gupta, the program requires no technical knowledge, just drag and drop to install M1 on Mac. However, you’ll need an M1 or M2 Mac running at least macOS 15.2 — the app uses Apple Silicon’s built-in AI intelligence and runs a robust diffusion model locally that ensures nothing is sent to any servers.
You can adjust settings including the height and width of the image, the number of steps the model takes to generate results, and the “Guide Scale” – how much weight the model gives to text guidance when generating results. Note that, at least in my testing, adjusting these parameters higher than the default significantly increased image generation time.
This is a very easy (and free) way to get started with Stable Diffusion if you have a Mac to use it.
