Generating ~450 images for $0.50

#ai #python #showdev

Gallery link: https://pkf-ai-gallery.pages.dev/

I've been getting more and more interested in the Bittensor ecosystem, a decentralized, open-source network interconnected machine learning models.

One of the more interesting "subnets" in the network is Chutes.ai which provides Serverless AI Compute across a bunch of different LLMs, image models, etc. I had listened to them in a recent podcast interview and was looking for an excuse to play around.

I asked DeepSeek-R1 to come up with 50 imaginative prompts:

A celestial cathedral floating atop a spiraling nebula, its stained-glass windows depicting constellations come to life, gilded arches entwined with ivy made of starlight, surrounded by floating orbs of liquid mercury
An opulent steampunk airship shaped like a mechanical peacock, its feathers crafted from interlocking brass gears and glowing amber lenses, hovering above a fog-shrouded Victorian metropolis illuminated by gaslamps
A surreal garden where trees are composed of cascading sapphire ribbons, their roots embedded in pools of liquid gold, guarded by stone serpents with eyes of smoldering opal under a twilight sky streaked with auroras
47 more...

And then ran those through 9 different image models:

Dreamshaper XL 1.0
Flux 1 Dev
Flux 1 Schnell
JuggernautXL
Ostris Flex 1 Alpha
Playground v2.5
Psychedelic Trees
Realistic Vision v5.1
Shitao Omnigen v1

All in all, it cost about $0.50 (~$0.001 per image), which I paid for using $TAO, the native currency of Bittensor.

I used Cursor's new-ish Agent mode to write the Python code to make all of this possible. The entire project took about ~15-20 minutes of tinkering around in Cursor, and then an hour or two to generate all of the images (which I just let run before going to bed).

I then took the list of prompts and image directory and (again) had Cursor generate a gallery that I uploaded to Cloudflare Pages.

You can view the final gallery here: https://pkf-ai-gallery.pages.dev/

Overall, this was a fun little project that has been made possible / much easier through the advent of lower-cost AI models, and code workflow assistants like Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Replit Agent, Q Developer, etc.