← Concept IndexDEFINITION WHY IT MATTERS COMMONLY CONFUSED WITH
Diffusion & image generation
Also called: text-to-image, denoising
Most image generators work by diffusion: they start from random noise and remove it step by step, steered by your text prompt, until a coherent image remains.
It explains why prompts act like a brief rather than a command, why fine details (hands, text, counts) are unreliable, and why two runs of the same prompt differ. You're guiding a denoiser, not describing a photo to a person.
Collage or search. The model isn't stitching found images together; it's generating pixels from noise under the prompt's guidance.