How the AI Horde works

Who generates your image, what kudos are for, and why the wait moves around.

Short read7 parts

What this covers

Skill level

  1. 1 · Who generates your image

    The AI Horde is a crowd of volunteers. Each one runs a small program called a worker on their own computer. The worker asks the horde for jobs and sends the finished images back. When you press Generate, someone's machine at home draws your picture. No company runs the machines that draw it.The number of workers rises and falls through the day as people switch them on and off, and so does the list of models you can pick from, because each worker chooses which models it carries.

  2. 2 · What happens after you press Generate

    Your request goes into the horde's queue, and no particular machine is chosen for it.Workers ask for work as they free up, and one that carries your model and can meet what you asked for takes the job, generates the image, and sends it back for the horde to hand to you.Where you sit in that queue depends on your kudos and on how ordinary the request is: a common model at a common size is picked up sooner than something only a couple of workers can serve.

  3. 3 · What kudos are

    Kudos are how the horde keeps track of who has given and who has taken.
    • Running a worker and generating for other people earns them.
    • Asking for images spends them.
    Kudos cannot be bought, sold or exchanged for money, and they have no use outside the AI Horde. Their only effect is your place in the queue.You can generate with none of them, or with a negative balance, and without an account at all. It only means waiting behind the people who have contributed.

  4. 4 · Trusted workers and the NSFW setting

    The horde records how much correct work each worker has done. A worker that has served reliably for a long time is marked trusted.You can ask that only trusted workers handle your requests, which usually means waiting longer for a smaller pool.Every request also carries a flag saying whether it may come back with adult content. Workers set their own limits on what they will accept, so a request marked that way goes to the workers willing to serve it.Both are options in the Horde card, and the defaults are fine for a first image.

  5. 5 · Why the wait moves around

    How long you wait changes a lot from one request to the next. Four things decide it:
    • how many workers are online at that moment
    • how many people are queued ahead of you
    • how rare the model you picked is
    • how much work your request is to run
    A large image with many steps takes a worker longer than a small one.No fixed figure would be accurate. Watch the estimate the studio shows, and pick a common model when you are in a hurry.

  6. 6 · What you get back

    When a worker finishes, the picture comes straight back to you and appears in the results panel as a tile. Open one to see it larger, or use its menu to reuse the settings that made it, send it back in as a source image, or download it.The horde keeps no copy. Your finished images are held in this browser and nowhere else, so download anything you want to keep.

  7. 7 · See it for yourself

    You can check all of this yourself.The Workers page lists every machine signed in right now, what it carries and how much it has generated, and the Status page shows the queue and how much work the horde is getting through.If you have not made an image yet, the tutorial takes one request through the panel field by field and ends with you sending it into the queue you have just been reading about.