I am completely uninformed in this space. Would someone be kind to explain what the current state of the art in image generation is (how does this compare to Midjourney and others)? How do open source models stack up? Also what are the most common use cases for image generation?
If you want to get arty, then state of the art for out-of-the-box typing in a prompt and clicking "generate" is probably MidJourney.
But if you're willing to spend some more time playing around with the open-source tooling, community finetunes, model augmentations (LyCORIS, etc), SD is probably going to get you the farthest.
> Also what are the most common use cases for image generation?
By sheer number of image generations? Take a guess...