LibreOffice users can now generate AI art inside Writer and Impress

LibreOffice doesn’t ship with artificial intelligence features by default, but a new extension gives the office suite AI-powered features thanks to a community effort.

While Microsoft Office has started to integrate AI directly into its products, often tied to cloud subscriptions and proprietary tools, LibreOffice follows a different path where volunteers and independent developers can add optional capabilities through open-source extensions.

Developer Igor Támara has created “Stable Diffusion for LibreOffice,” which allows users to generate images from text prompts using AI Horde, a distributed cluster of volunteer GPUs.

The extension is very easy to use. “You write some text describing an image, and get an AI image generated from the given text. You can tweak parameters, choose a model and use the best result on written documents, presentations or the place you prefer. The images are generated on volunteer GPUs through AI Horde,” Támara explained on The Document Foundation blog.

He began the project only recently. “Two weeks ago, starting from a Gimp plugin as a base. I’m brand new to the LibreOffice project, and started it as a macro to get this functionality in the software. One week later I put it on GitHub,” he said.

With support from the LibreOffice forum and bug tracker community, he turned the macro into a full extension.

At the moment, the extension has some limitations. Internet access is required, since the heavy lifting is done on distributed GPUs rather than the user’s own machine.

“Be aware that the text you provide is sent to AI Horde and seen by the machines that create the image, so do not send sensitive data,” Támara noted.

The system can also sometimes flag content as not safe for work, in which case it produces a placeholder message instead of an image.

Greater LibreOffice integration

Currently the extension works in Writer and Impress, while other LibreOffice components trigger it to open a new text document before inserting the generated image.

Támara plans to add translation into more languages, optional pre-translation to English, proper integration with Calc and Draw, and a kudos system where image ratings give users higher priority in future requests.

The developer is encouraging community involvement, from reporting issues to translating the interface. He also pointed out that anyone with a GPU can join AI Horde as a worker, donating computing power to the system in exchange for kudos.

You can download the extension here.

What do you think about AI-generated images coming to LibreOffice through community extensions? Let us know in the comments.