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A Short History of Generative AI

A Short History of Generative AI

Updated: 2026-05

1. About This Page

The Comfy Cloud you interact with during class is built on the advancements in generative AI technology made over the past few years. This page offers a brief overview of that evolution. We won’t go into too much detail. It’s enough to get a basic understanding of the representative models from each era and the symbolic events that occurred in society—just one sentence for each.

In class, I plan to cover this section in about 15 minutes and have students read it as a pre- or post-class assignment, as needed.

2. 2022 — The Summer of the Big Bang

The year image-generating AI exploded in popularity.

  • February: Midjourney v1 — A Discord-based text-to-image service
  • August: Stable Diffusion 1.4 — Released as open source. Anyone can run it on their own GPU
  • September: Théâtre D’opéra Spatial Incident — An image generated by Jason Allen using Midjourney won first place in the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair. This sparked a global debate over whether it was art and who the artist was

Allen’s case eventually reached the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO), which denied copyright registration for works created largely by AI. In 2025, the USCO updated its policy, stating that “works may be eligible for protection if they involve creative human intervention, such as selection, editing, or arrangement.” The distinction between fully automated generation and works involving significant human involvement remains a central point of debate.

3. 2023 — Node-based UI and Improved Model Quality

  • January: ComfyUI Released — A node-based interface for Stable Diffusion. While complex for beginners, it’s an excellent learning tool because it displays the internal processing directly on the screen.
  • July: SDXL 1.0 — Enables high-resolution generation at 1024×1024. Significantly reduces artifacts in hands and faces.

Web UIs (such as AUTOMATIC1111) are “applications” consisting of checkboxes and sliders, while ComfyUI is an “editor for building processes.” We have entered an era where we can interact with the same Stable Diffusion using two UIs designed for different purposes.

4. 2024 — The First Year of Video-Generating AI

  • February: Sora announced (OpenAI) — Realistic one-minute videos generated from text. A game-changer for the video industry
  • February: Stable Diffusion 3 — Further improvements in text-image alignment
  • Second half of the year: Kling AI — A video generation service from China launches commercially
  • Flux — Black Forest Labs (part of the original Stable Diffusion development team) releases a new high-quality image model

From this point on, “video-generating AI”—an extension of “image-generating AI”—will begin to reach a level where it can be used as a practical production tool.

5. 2025 — The Rise of Video Generation and the Emergence of Aggregators

  • March: Sora 2 — Significant improvements in quality and speed; commercial adoption expands
  • Hailuo AI — Strengths in real-time performance and Asian-style expressions; relatively generous free usage limits
  • ComfyUI on Cloud — Comfy Cloud officially launched. Accessible even without a local GPU
  • The establishment of the AI Aggregator model — Services like Pollo.ai, which allow users to access multiple models from a single UI, are becoming widespread

Services have generally fallen into two categories: those that offer a single model and those that act as aggregators, bundling multiple models. While Comfy Cloud falls into the former category, it is a hybrid system that can also call upon third-party models via Partner Nodes (such as Sora, Kling, Veo, and Nano Banana).

6. 2026: Current Status

The banner image at the top was generated using Z Image Turbo on Comfy Cloud with the default prompt, using the free quota (approximately 2 credits per image, 1024×1024).

When I ran the same prompt on SD 1.4 in 2022, the hands and faces of people often looked distorted, and the background often appeared as if it had been filled in. In just under four years since then, the results have reached a level where they are virtually indistinguishable from photographs.

The Comfy Cloud used in our teaching materials presents the culmination of our efforts over the past four years in a format that allows users to open nodes and view their contents. In class, we make the most of this feature that allows students to see what’s inside.

7. Related Links

The following will not be covered during class time. It is intended as supplementary reading for students who are interested.

8. What’s Next

  • AI Tools Overview — An overview of the major models and tools currently available
  • External Resources — Useful videos, articles, and communities outside the university
  • Diffusion Mechanism — An intuitive explanation of what diffusion models do internally
AI Tools Overview