I downloaded Intel's new AI Playground beta and may have finally found something Arc is honestly good at

Proponents of generative AI would often have you believe that such systems are all about making serious improvements to your productivity and work. But for owners of Arc graphics cards, Intel believes you should just have fun and mess around with it. To that end, it has released a beta version of AI Playground, a free and open-source application that lets you use your Alchemist GPU to generate and edit AI images and talk nonsense with a chatbot.

Intel first teased AI Playground at Computex, earlier this year, and now a public beta version of the app is available to download for Windows. You'll need an Arc graphics card with 8 GB or more of VRAM—it won't run on any other GPU, unfortunately.

The installation will pull a copy of Python off the Internet if you don't have it already installed. If you do have Python on your gaming PC and AI Playground crashes when you run it, it's probably a version conflict and the only option to resolve the problem, at the moment, is to remove all instances of Python you currently have.

AI Playground's main features are the text-to-image and image-to-image generative tools that use Stable Diffusion 1.5 as the primary model of choice. You can try that system without using Intel's app, of course, via Hugging Face's online generator but the idea behind AI Playground is that it's all run locally—slower than a dedicated server perhaps but certainly a lot more private and secure.

I gave it a go using an Arc A770, which has 16 GB of VRAM, and the first thing I noticed was the installation process is pretty long, as it needs to pull all the files and models it needs off various servers. If you have a slow net connection, be prepared to give some time to finish the whole process. Once done, you can fire up the app, wait a few seconds for it to initialise, and then you're free to mess about.

Well, not immediately. The moment I entered some text to generate an image, the app spat out a message saying I didn't have the right AI model installed.