AI image generators have been brewing (generating?) up a storm for the last couple of years. If you’ve been on social media, watched prime time news shows, or read a magazine, AI-generated images have been impossible to miss. They’re everywhere, and it’s easy to see why: the tools necessary to make them are now good—and available to the public. If you want to join in the fun, or add some AI-powered features to your business workflows, the apps on this list will give you what you’re looking for.
I’ve been writing about AI image generators since Google Deep Dream in 2015. That’s about as long as anyone outside of a computer science lab has realistically been thinking about these tools, and I’m really excited by how far they’ve come.
I’m going to try to avoid the thorny discussions around artistic merit, whether or not these tools are replacing or augmenting artists, and copyright infringement in training data, at least where I can. Instead, I’ll focus on the fact that these AI image generators can now produce fascinating results from a wide range of text prompts.
It’s worth taking a few hours to play around with one of these text-to-image AI apps—even just so you can appreciate them from a technical perspective. Whether you like it or not, we’re all seeing a lot of their output at the moment. And there will only be more to come.
The best AI image generators
How do AI image generators work?
All these AI image generators take a text prompt and then turn it—as best they can—into a matching image. This opens up some wild possibilities, since your prompt can be anything from “an impressionist oil painting of a Canadian man riding a moose through a forest of maple trees” to “a painting in the style of Vermeer of a large fluffy Irish wolfhound enjoying a pint of beer in a traditional pub” or “a photograph of a donkey on the moon.”
Seriously, the only real limits are your imagination, the AI image generator’s ability to comprehend your prompt, and any content filters put in place to stop plagiarism, copyright infringement, and bad actors flooding the internet with AI-generated violence or other NSFW content. (That Vermeer prompt used to work reliably, but some image generators now block it because it uses a named artist.)
Most AI image generators work in a pretty similar way. Millions or billions of image-text pairs are used to train a neural network (basically, a very fancy computer algorithm modeled loosely on the human brain) on what things are. By allowing it to process near-countless images, it learns what dogs, the color red, Vermeers, and everything else are. Once this is done, you have an AI that can interpret almost any prompt—though there is a skill in setting things up so it can do so accurately.
The next step is to actually render the AI-generated image. The latest generation of AI image generators do that using a process called diffusion. In essence, they start with a random field of noise and then edit it in a series of steps to match their interpretation of the prompt. It’s kind of like looking up at a cloudy sky, finding a cloud that looks kind of like a dog, and then being able to snap your fingers to keep making it more and more dog-like.
Before we dive in: I don’t want to oversell things. What these text-to-image generators can do is very impressive, but they aren’t likely to save you from ever having to do a product photoshoot again. If you just need some weird or unique images, they can really help. But if you’re looking for something super specific, you’re better off hiring a photographer—or licensing the exact image you want. Similarly, trying to use one to make a header image for a blog post can take a lot more time than just finding a header image for your blog through a stock photo site. Sure, it won’t be as custom, but the model is more likely to have ten fingers.
What makes the best AI image generator?
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There’s a reason that AI image generators have become incredibly popular over the past two years: before that, they were pretty bad. The technology underlying them was incredibly cool and impressive, at least to research scientists, but the images they could output were underwhelming. Even the original DALL·E was more of a fun novelty than a world-shaking revelation when it launched in 2021.
Now that these text-to-image generators have been around for a while, we’re starting to see some real competition between different models. The results they produce are also a lot more realistic. So, to find the best AI art generators, I set some pretty strict criteria:
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I was looking for apps that allowed you to generate AI images from a text prompt. Tools that have you upload a dozen of your photos and then spit out AI-generated portraits are fun (and normally built using Stable Diffusion), but they aren’t the kind of general-purpose image generators I was considering.
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I was looking at the AI image generators themselves, not tools built on top of them. For example, NightCafe is an AI picture generator that has a great community and app, but it just enables you to use open source models like FLUX and Stable Diffusion, fine-tuned models based on various versions of them, the DALL·E 3 API, as well as a handful of older generative models. It’s worth checking out, but it doesn’t meet my criteria for its own entry on this list.
Aside from all that, I also considered how easy each AI image creator is to use, what kinds of controls and customization options it provides (for things like AI image upscale), what pricing model it has, and most important of all: how good were the results? The best AI image generators are now far less likely to create weird or impossible-looking things.
I’ve been using and writing about text-to image generators since the original DALL·E launched, and about photography and art for more than a decade, so I’m pretty familiar with how all these tools work—and their various pros, cons, and bonkers behaviors. But writing this article was actually the first time I’ve put so many AI image generators head-to-head with the same prompts. The results were fascinating, and I’m delighted to say all the apps on the list offer genuine reasons to use them.
Before we dive in, one more thing to note: a lot of these tools are technically in beta, and I suspect they’ll remain that way for a while. While they’re getting more and more impressive every day, AI image generators have a long way to go before they’re able to consistently produce great results and reliably fit into commercial workflows.
Unfortunately, being in beta doesn’t mean these tools are free. It’s understandable, given the heavy computing load involved in creating AI images, but it still means that they’re harder to just play around with.
How to use AI image generation at work
Interested in AI, but not quite sure how you’d use it at work? Here are a few of the ways people are turning to AI image generation in their roles:
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Generating hero images for blog posts
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Creating social media posts
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Generating slide decks and storyboards
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Creating personalized images for customers
Learn more about how to use AI image generation at work.
The best AI image generators at a glance
Best for |
Access options |
Price |
Parent company |
|
---|---|---|---|---|
DALLE·3 |
Ease of use |
ChatGPT Plus or Enterprise; Bing’s AI Copilot; API |
2 free images/day with a free ChatGPT plan; included with ChatGPT Plus at $20/month |
OpenAI |
Midjourney |
High-quality results |
Discord, web app |
From $10/month for ~200 images/month and commercial usage rights |
Midjourney |
Ideogram |
Accurate text |
Web app |
Limited free plan; from $8/month for full-resolution download and 400 monthly priority credits |
Ideogram AI |
Stable Diffusion |
Customization and control |
NightCafe, Tensor.Art, Civitai, and lots of other apps; API; downloading it to a local server |
Depends on the platform |
Stability AI |
FLUX.1 |
Stable Diffusion alternative |
NightCafe, Tensor.Art, Civitai, and lots of other apps; API; downloading it to a local server |
Depends on the platform |
Black Forest Labs |
Adobe Firefly |
Integrating AI-generated images into photos |
firefly.adobe.com, Photoshop, Express, and other Adobe tools |
Free for 25 credits/month; from $4.99 for 100 credits/month |
Adobe |
Generative AI by Getty |
Commercially safe images |
iStock |
From $14.99 for 100 AI generations |
Getty (uses NVIDIA Picasso) |