The Illustrated Stable Diffusion
Overview
Jay Alammar's beautifully illustrated breakdown of how Stable Diffusion works — covering diffusion processes, VAEs, CLIP text encoders, and U-Net denoisers in plain English.
Full Description
Jay Alammar is famous for making complex AI systems understandable through clear illustrations, and 'The Illustrated Stable Diffusion' is one of his best. The article explains the complete Stable Diffusion pipeline: how images are encoded into latent space using a Variational Autoencoder, how CLIP encodes text prompts into embeddings, how the diffusion process adds and removes noise, and how the U-Net denoiser guided by text conditioning reverses the diffusion step by step. If you've ever wondered what actually happens when you type a prompt into Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, this is the article that explains it.