From puffer-jacket-wearing Pope Francis to Wes Anderson-inspired movie trailers, AI-generated images are becoming increasingly popular on the Internet. It’s not hard to see why – modern AI tools have become so convincing that their images have won prestigious photography awards. You don’t have to be a talented artist or photographer to create beautiful art either. If you have ever used a chatbot like ChatGPT or Bing Chat, you will feel right at home using any one of the best AI image generators.
In order to create an AI image, all you need is a text prompt describing the scene you have in mind. For example, I used the phrase “The golden hour on the New York City skyline with its tall skyscrapers and bustling streets” in one of the photos below. However, your imagination can get wilder, with detailed prompts outlining all the intricate details.
So with those capabilities in mind, here’s our list of the best AI image generators available right now. We will keep this list updated as technology continues to evolve.
The best AI image generators
From free to paid and from simple to complex, you’ll quickly learn no two AI image generators exist. In fact, almost all of them differ in terms of their underlying machine learning models as well. This means that identical claims will give you different results depending on which generator you are using. To that end, here are your options:
Medjourney
Calvin Enkidi / Android Authority
Although Midjourney wasn’t the first AI photo creator, it has now become the preferred choice of many. That’s because Midjourney’s latest V5 has outpaced most of the competition. In some cases, the results it produces can appear realistic, albeit with some minor errors that reveal its AI heritage.
Unlike most of the other services on this list, you can’t access Midjourney through a website or app. Instead, you’ll need to use Discord – the chat app commonly used for gaming communities. That’s not a bad thing, because Discord works on all major platforms, including the web browser. To get started, simply create an account and join the Midjourney Discord server. You may have to accept the Terms of Service before starting, but this is the only barrier to entry.
Midjourney has become everyone’s favorite photo creator.
New members only get a limited amount of free photos (about 25) as part of a free trial. However, Midjourney disables the free trial during heavy traffic periods. The cheapest way to use the service is a $10 monthly subscription. You can save a little more if you stick to a full year’s subscription. Unfortunately, this level still only gets you about 200 photos per month.
While you can use Midjourney with basic prompts that include just a few words (or even an emoji), its real strength lies in the parameters. For example, you can specify an aspect ratio of 16:9 using the format --ar parameter or create anime style images with --niji.
D-E
Zak Khan / Android Authority
Dall-E became the first AI to go mainstream when it was launched in 2021. The latest version, Dall-E 2, takes things to another level with better language understanding capabilities and higher quality visuals. It can also edit existing images, allowing you to completely replace or add new objects.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, created Dall-E. The company used its large GPT-3 language model as a basis, which explains how the image generator understands your prompts.
Using Dall-E is simple and straightforward. You will need an OpenAI account, which you may already have if you have previously used ChatGPT. Once you’re signed in, you can enter your router in the text box and hit be born button.
Dall-E was the first AI image creator to gain traction, but it’s not always the best option.
Each photo you create will cost 1 credit. Unfortunately, Dall-E no longer gives new users any way to get free credits. This practice ended in April 2023, so if you create an account today, you will need to purchase credits. You will have to load $15 each time, which results in 115 credits. That works out to about 13 cents per use, which isn’t too bad for one of the best AI image generators out there.
Having said that, you can still use Dall-E for free with Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Scroll down to learn more about how to do this.
Stable spread over the Internet
Kevin Convery/Android Authority
Unlike other AI image generators on this list, Stable Diffusion is completely free and open source. If you own a powerful computer with a dedicated graphics card, you can even download and run the template yourself. Better yet, it works completely offline. However, this is not an option for everyone as the minimum requirement requires a GPU with 8GB of VRAM. This rules out most non-gaming or non-workstation computers.
Stable Diffusion is a free and open source machine learning model for image generation.
The good news? You can use Stable Diffusion to create images entirely in your web browser. Just visit StableDiffusionOnline and write a prompt. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
You don’t need an account, but your results will be saved and visible to others. For maximum privacy, you will have to run the form on your computer. You can’t see your personal generation history either, so it’s only for one-time use. Having said that, the platform allows you to browse past claims and their results. This can come in handy when you lack artistic inspiration.
DreamStudio
Calvin Enkidi / Android Authority
While StableDiffusionOnline from the above section works well enough for a free service, it’s not full-featured. You can’t customize the size of an image, for example, nor can you modify it a generation later. But fortunately, the creators of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, have the solution in the form of DreamStudio.
Once you open DreamStudio, you’ll notice that it looks like a polished application with many buttons and numbers. You can create multiple images at once (or less), change the aspect ratio, delete specific elements in the AI-generated masterpiece, and more. DreamStudio also offers different “styles”, covering everything from photorealistic to origami shapes and comic book looks.
From different styles to various editing features, DreamStudio offers a highly customizable experience.
On top of all that, you can also add and remove objects in your AI-generated photos using the Edit tab. For example, try using the eraser tool to remove certain parts of the image. Then type a prompt to fill in the blank.
As an official product and a highly polished product, DreamStudio costs money to use. But the good news is that you get 25 free credits when you sign up, which gives you 125 gi. On top of that, the $10 minimum purchase gets you 1,000 icons or roughly 5,000 AI-generated images.
ping chat
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
Microsoft’s Bing search engine gained a powerful new chat mode shortly after the release of ChatGPT. Since then, it’s only gotten more capable with the company adding a free AI image generator into the mix as well. Dubbed Bing Image Creator, the service now has a dedicated page with ideas and instructions on how to use it.
Since Microsoft works closely with OpenAI’s ChatGPT creator, it’s no surprise that Bing’s Image Creator uses Dall-E under the hood. This means that if you run out of free credits on one platform, you can simply switch to another platform.
Image creation uses Bing Chat Dall-E under the hood and doesn’t cost a penny.
When you sign in with your Microsoft account, Image Creator automatically gives you a 100 “boost”. These are basically credits that allow you to create a new image almost instantly. Boosts renew each week automatically, and you cannot pay for more credits at this point. What happens when I run out of reinforcements? As the name hints, you have to wait longer. But the good news is that you will still be able to create an unlimited number of photos for free.
You can also access the image generator through Vanilla Bing Chat, even on mobile. Simply switch to creative mode and start prompting to “Create a picture of…”. This method follows the same chatbot limit at the moment, at 200 threads per day.
That’s it for our list of the best AI image generators available today. Have you used any of them yet? Let us know which one you’d use to compete in the survey below.
Which AI image generator do you think is best for your needs?
4 votes