  Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a cutting-edge technology capable
of producing text, images, and various media content leveraging generative
models and user prompts. Between 2022 and 2023, generative AI surged in
popularity with a plethora of applications spanning from AI-powered movies to
chatbots. In this paper, we delve into the potential of generative AI within
the realm of the World Wide Web, specifically focusing on image generation. Web
developers already harness generative AI to help crafting text and images,
while Web browsers might use it in the future to locally generate images for
tasks like repairing broken webpages, conserving bandwidth, and enhancing
privacy. To explore this research area, we have developed WebDiffusion, a tool
that allows to simulate a Web powered by stable diffusion, a popular
text-to-image model, from both a client and server perspective. WebDiffusion
further supports crowdsourcing of user opinions, which we use to evaluate the
quality and accuracy of 409 AI-generated images sourced from 60 webpages. Our
findings suggest that generative AI is already capable of producing pertinent
and high-quality Web images, even without requiring Web designers to manually
input prompts, just by leveraging contextual information available within the
webpages. However, we acknowledge that direct in-browser image generation
remains a challenge, as only highly powerful GPUs, such as the A40 and A100,
can (partially) compete with classic image downloads. Nevertheless, this
approach could be valuable for a subset of the images, for example when fixing
broken webpages or handling highly private content.
