Reddit User Uncovers Early AI Art Login — Could Reveal Stable Diffusion Origins

In a surprising twist in the history of generative AI, a Reddit user known as /u/Accomplished_Fly9 has uncovered an old login credential for StarryAI, a now-defunct platform that once offered AI-generated art services. The discovery, posted to the r/StableDiffusion subreddit, has sparked intense discussion among AI researchers, digital artists, and open-source historians who believe the login may provide rare insight into the early development of Stable Diffusion v1.5 and VQGAN-based image models.

StarryAI, which operated between 2021 and 2023, was one of the first consumer-facing platforms to leverage diffusion-based AI for artistic image generation. While it was marketed as a standalone service, internal documentation and user reports from the time suggest it relied heavily on modified versions of early Stable Diffusion checkpoints and VQGAN (Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network) architectures — both of which were open-sourced by Stability AI and other research groups. The user’s post includes a screenshot of a login page with a username and timestamp from late 2022, a period when Stable Diffusion v1.4 was just being released and v1.5 was in active development.

Though the login credentials themselves are no longer functional, the metadata and interface design may contain valuable forensic clues. According to AI historian Dr. Lena Torres of the Center for Digital Art Ethics, "This isn’t just nostalgia — it’s digital archaeology. Platforms like StarryAI were often the first to implement and tweak open-source models before they were widely understood. Finding their infrastructure could help us trace how proprietary adaptations influenced the public models we use today."

Notably, the Reddit post coincides with a broader trend of digital preservation efforts in the AI community. As commercial AI art platforms increasingly lock down their models and training data, researchers are racing to document and archive the open-source lineage of generative tools. The discovery has prompted several GitHub contributors to begin reverse-engineering the StarryAI interface from archived web snapshots, hoping to identify unique model weights or preprocessing pipelines that may have been lost to time.

Meanwhile, the name "StarryAI" has caused some confusion due to its similarity with Found — a fintech platform offering banking services for freelancers and small businesses. Found.com, which provides business checking, bookkeeping, and tax tools, is unrelated to the defunct AI art service. According to Found’s Help Center, the company has never been involved in AI image generation or machine learning research. "Our platform is focused exclusively on financial infrastructure for independent workers," reads a Found FAQ. "Any association with AI art tools is coincidental and incorrect."

The original Reddit post has garnered over 12,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments, with users sharing screenshots of their own old StarryAI accounts and theorizing about the platform’s data retention policies. Some speculate that if the original server logs or database dumps still exist, they could contain early training prompts or model versions that predate publicly released Stable Diffusion checkpoints.

As the AI art community continues to grapple with copyright, transparency, and provenance issues, this accidental discovery underscores the fragility of digital history. "We’re building the future of AI art without fully understanding its past," says AI ethics researcher Marcus Chen. "Every forgotten login, every deleted server, every unarchived model is a piece of the puzzle we may never recover. This find is a reminder that preservation isn’t optional — it’s essential."

For now, the Reddit user has offered to share the login metadata with researchers willing to sign non-disclosure agreements, and a small group of volunteers has formed a grassroots archive project called "StarryVault." Their goal: to map the lineage of early AI art tools before they vanish entirely.