Ranking 13 AI Art / Image Generators in 2023 (Surprising Results!)
Imagine you give an AI program a short description of an image that you’d like to create, and after a few seconds, boom! An original piece of art/ image that has never existed in this world before is created out of thin air right in front of you. That’s the magic and fun of AI Art/ Image Generators, and that’s what we are going to explore in this article!
With so many of these AI tools available out there, I’m going to compare 13 existing AI Art/ Image Generators on the market (most, if not all of them, are free to try until you use up the limits) for you in this article.
Let me be honest with you, I had SO MUCH fun preparing this article. Let’s dive in!
Don’t forget to check these out if you want to learn more about MidJourney and AI image Generators, they’re seriously good:
- Create The Most Photorealistic Images on MidJourney — Success Prompting Formula & 100+ Cheat Codes (Part 1)
- MidJourney’s New Inpainting Feature “Vary (Region)” is just…WOW!
- 50+ Inspiring Cheat Codes to Boost Your Creativity on MidJourney — Part 1
- The Ultimate Cheat Sheet to MidJourney Prompting — Artist Styles
- The Ultimate Guide to MidJourney V5.2 (with images & prompts!)
- The Ultimate Cheat Codes to MidJourney Prompting — Part 1
- The Ultimate Cheat Codes to MidJourney Prompting — Part 2
- 6 Awesome MidJourney V5 / V5.1 Tips & Tricks That Nobody Talks About!
First thing first, what is an AI art/ image generator exactly?
An AI art/ image generator is a computer program that creates images from scratch based on your own personal preferences, by using artificial intelligence algorithms. It’s like having your own personal photoshop — but without all the tedious work! Simply describe the image you want to create, provide a few parameters and let the AI do the rest.
You have probably heard about DALL-E and DALL-E 2 by OpenAI that, together with GPT-3 have been democratizing AI. OpenAI is a San Francisco company co-owned by Elon Musk.
Whether you’re looking for a new desktop background, a piece of art for your home, generating NFT art or just something to play with, an AI art/ image generator is a great way to create something unique.
How does it work?
You may be scratching your head right now, wondering how these AI art/ image generators work. Without getting too technical, it would be helpful to have a basic understanding of two basic concepts in machine learning: supervised and unsupervised learning.
Supervised learning is where the machine is given a set of training data that are clearly labeled and the expected input and output, and the machine learns to generalize from the data to produce the expected output. While unsupervised learning is where the machine is given data but not told what the expected output should be, and the machine has to learn to recognize patterns in the data.
Supervised learning is typically used when the desired output is known in advance. Vice versa, unsupervised learning is typically used when the desired output is not known in advance. In this case of AI art/ image generators, as the machine wouldn’t know in advance what instructions (prompts) we will give, the output is produced through unsupervised learning.
Sounds amazing, isn’t it?
Let’s get to the comparison
I’m going to compare the following 13 AI art/ image generator tools:
- Deep Dream Generator
- Starryai
- Midjourney
- Mindseye Lite
- Runway
- Dream by WOMBO
- Art Breeder
- Craiyon
- IMGCreator
- Stable Diffusion
- Simplifed
- Night Cafe
- DeepAI
And I’m going to rank them in the following 5 categories:
- Rank 1: Are you kidding me?!
- Rank 2: Not quite there yet
- Rank 3: Fairly decent, still have room to grow
- Rank 4: Wow, just WOW!
- Rank 5: The Most Entertaining Award
Rating Process:
I’m going to give each AI art/ image Generator the exact same 2 prompts as the following, one is simple and the other a bit more complex, to see what each one of them will generate.
Prompt 1:
A chubby pink bear sitting on the beach.
Prompt 2:
An attractive woman with red lips and long wavy blonde hair, dressed up in a space suit, holding an ice-cream cone, highly detailed, photo realistic.
Rank 1: Are you kidding me?!
AI Tool: Runway
Link: https://experiments.runwayml.com/generative_engine/
Prompt 1:
What are those?! Where is the pink bear?!
Prompt 2:
Is this supposed to be what the AI thinks an attractive woman is?
AI Tool: Craiyon
Link: https://www.craiyon.com/
Prompt 1:
Is there something wrong with you, bear?
Oh dear… are you okay?
Prompt 2:
Wait, what? I said ‘attractive woman,’ not ‘skeleton’…
With this, I swear I’m going to have a nightmare tonight.
Rank 2: Not quite there yet
Tool: Mindseye Lite
Link: https://huggingface.co/spaces/multimodalart/mindseye-lite
Prompt 1:
Ok, not too bad but where are his legs?
It seems there’s something wrong with its belly…
Prompt 2:
I’m sure I didn’t input ‘an attractive woman with two red lips’. And what’s with the watermark?
Wow, even though she doesn’t have an arm, she can hold an ice cream cone👍🏻
Tool: Art Breeder
Link: https://www.artbreeder.com/
Prompt 1:
Cute, but it ain’t a pink bear.
Another cute one, but still, it’s not a pink bear.
Prompt 2:
Nice art, but I asked for “long wavy blonde hair”.
I actually like this one, but again, it ain’t “long wavy blonde hair.” And it seems this tool loves to generate pink backgrounds for some reason…😅
Tool: Starryai
Link: https://starryai.com/
Prompt 1:
Nice one!
Another nice one!
Prompt 2:
What’s she eating? Raw meat?!
Wow, that ice cream is coming straight out from an ice-cream machine! And wait, is that the moon or ice cream at the corner?
Rank 3: Fairly decent, still have room to grow
Tool: Deep Dream Generator
Link: https://deepdreamgenerator.com/
Prompt 1:
Meets all my requirements!
Another decent one! Love how realistic it looks.
Prompt 2:
Wow, I don’t see any ice-cream cones but this is NICE!
Another high-quality one but still missing the ice-cream cone :(
Tool: Dream by WOMBO
Link: https://dream.ai/
Prompt 1:
Pretty photo-realistic, just something’s wrong with its body.
This is decent!
Prompt 2:
Haha, that looks like a giant coffee mug in an ice-cream cone shape. And I didn’t know that is how a space suit looks like.
She needs some help with her arm 😥
Tool: IMGCreator
Link: https://imgcreator.ai/
Prompt 1:
- Style chosen: ‘Anime’
I like it!
- Style chosen: ‘Character’
Another nice one!
Prompt 2:
- Style chosen: ‘Anime’
I have no complaints.
- Style chosen: ‘Character’
Ice-cream cone is missing, but a very high-quality image overall.
AI Tool: Night Cafe
Link: https://creator.nightcafe.studio/
Prompt 1:
- Style chosen: ‘Artistic Portrait’
Love this dreamy style and it fits all my requirements!
Also pretty decent.
Prompt 2:
- Style chosen: ‘Artistic Portrait’
Overall it is satisfying but is that ice-cream cone made out of melted cheese?
Gotta need that 3rd arm to hold the ice-cream cone!
AI Tool: Simplified
Link: https://app.simplified.com/tools/text-to-image
Prompt 1:
Hello, bear is that your umbilical cord?
Oh please don’t be sad…
Prompt 2:
Wait, is that Britney Spears?
Plastic surgery went wrong?
Tool: DeepAI
Link: https://deepai.org/
Prompt 1:
- Style chosen: Renaissance Painting
This is cute!
Still determining if the bear is sitting on the beach but nice art!
Prompt 2:
- Style chosen: Renaissance Painting
Not blonde hair and not sure if that’s a space outfit, but this is nice!
She looks awkward posing with an ice cream cone in that frame.
Rank 4: Wow, just WOW!
AI Tool: Midjourney
Link: https://midjourney.com/home/?callbackUrl=%2Fapp%2F
Prompt 1:
Wow, see the details of the sun shining on him!
Those details… I’d believe it if you tell me it’s a real photo.
Prompt 2:
This one is jaw-dropping…😲
Holy smokes…🤯
Rank 5: The Most Entertaining Award
The tool which gets this rank is the one I spent the most time with because I was soooo entertained with Prompt #2!
Tool: Stable Diffusion
Link: https://stablediffusionweb.com/
Prompt 1:
A high quality one!
Prompt 2: (Here comes the fun…)
Love how interesting these AI images are…😆
That one with the mustache!
Can’t get enough…😂
Okay this is the last 😂
Hope you guys have fun!
I truly hope this article brings you some joy looking at all these AI-generated images! I’d like to invite you all to try them out yourselves and let me know which tool you like the most. Be warned, they are highly addicting and you will end up spending hours generating images (like I did)! Have fun!
Last but not least… (Another one generated by Stable Diffusion)
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Here’s a special shoutout to Ms. Bee Lee, for her crucial effort that contributed to creating this article. Follow her Twitter for her “Daily Dose of AI Art”!
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