You now can’t go anywhere without finding some company shouting from the rooftops about generative AI. While the folks at Snapchat and Discord are busy slapping OpenAI’s ChatGPT into their systems, companies like Shutterstock and Adobe think more people would be interested in using a AI image generator when grabbing a stock image. Don’t mind Getty Images though, they have some pretty negative thoughts about AI.
Maybe you’re trying to see what the fuss is about, or perhaps you just want to create something new or cool, but AI image generators remains an interesting bit of tech, especially when used for fun and not profit. Leaving the question of whether AI-generated pictures are legitimate “art” by the wayside, the best system-produced images are more than just ways to create strange nightmare depictions of celebrities portrayed in various art styles. At the same time, it’s not enough for the digital artiste to vaguely offer an impressionistic, oddly shaped “interpretation” of users’ original pictures or prompts.
There’s a middle ground amid all this crush between technology and art that even the most untrained in the arts of brush on canvas can comprehend. What can inspire us? What can intrigue us? That is what AI image generators have the capacity to do.
So we turn to the free AI art generators, or at least the ones that offer free trial options. There’s systems like Jasper, which released its AI art generator Jan. 17. But while its program seems interesting, there’s no way to get a free trial without inputting credit card details where it will automatically charge you after five days. Sorry, but that’s not free.
For the purpose of these rankings, I wanted to ignore the hubbub around total terabytes of training images, but the total time it takes to create each image, their standard free resolution, and usability are all taken into account. To best rank each program, I gave them all the same, rather esoteric, text prompts based on some books I’ve recently read. Those books include:
Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng
Prompt: “A man and woman stand under a pendulum sun in the heart of Arcadia.”
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
Prompt: “A lone mathematician stands on a dusty planet owning nothing.”
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Prompt: “A foreign woman struggles alone against the machinations of a cosmic empire.”
There are several image generators which require photos instead of text prompts. As much as I would like to keep it consistent, I want to be inclusive of different systems rather than exclude them. For the image generating platforms that don’t allow for text prompts, I used the same image for each one:
Some systems, like ArtBreeder’s “collager” model, ask users to be a little more creative when generating images by formatting shapes and images into new art. In my own tests I found it did not create art with any meaningful quality, so I did not include that feature in the list. Artbreeder’s “Splicer” model kept deforming the image to the point it was unusable, and I quickly used up its three upload slots for the free version. Sorry, but no dice, Artbreeder.
Also, other systems like MyHeritage’s AI Time Machine sure is neat, but for one, it doesn’t like it when you put in dog pics. More importantly, it requires you invest put in a credit card to sign up for a free trial. That doesn’t meet my definition of “free.”
There’s a whole lot of weirdness with AI-generated images, especially video. Gizmodo has its own list of the strangest AI-generated commercials you can find here. With the advent of text-to-video models, there’s even more potential for off-the-wall generated content, so we’re including the free video generators in our rankings.
I’m no art critic by any imagination, but at least I can tell whether AI generated art actually attempted to depict a prompt in a way that’s not derivative or that relies upon copying and replicating art found on the internet.
To be honest, I’m pleasantly surprised by some of the results from a few of the more popular free art generators. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Want to know more about AI, chatbots, and the future of machine learning? Check out our full coverage of artificial intelligence, or browse our guides on How to Use ChatGPT and Everything We Know About the OpenAI chatbot.
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The first text-to-video AI generator to catch the internet’s attention, ModelScope, was released in March 2023. The AI video generator is rudimentary, producing only 2-second clips that feature odd distortions much like early AI image generators. Many of its videos also bear the Shutterstock logo, hinting at where it gathers its training data from.
From Gizmodo’s test drive of ModelScope:
The AI text to video system called ModelScope was released March 18th and already caused some buzz for its occasionally awkward and often insane 2-second video clips. The DAMO Vision Intelligence Lab, a research division of e-commerce giant Alibaba, created the system as a kind of public test case. The system uses a pretty basic diffusion model to create its videos, according to the company’s page describing its AI model.
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There’re a few new models being created off the ModelScope prototype, including zeroscope_v2, a family of open source models. This creates higher quality video than ModelScope, and the XL version can updscale it 1024x576 resolution. It’s available on HuggingFace.
Generating video from the model can take quite a long time if you’re using somebody else’s public space, but the results are pretty interesting just by themselves.
Despite advertising itself as much more capable than others, text-to-video is still in its very, very early stages. Give it a simple prompt like “Man walking through the forest” and you’ll receive a rather simple rendition of what you asked. Give it anything more esoteric or imprecise, and it will spit out some pretty wild visuals. To be clear, I prefer some more stylistically strange, but people morphing into each other isn’t quite what I intended with a prompt.
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Runway.Ml’s much-hyped text-to-video generator is the best version you can get, but that’s more indicative of how far these generators need to go to create anything anywhere near as capable as most other AI image generators.
Most videos include a simply pan or dolly while the subjects on screen amble about or stare off into the distance. The picture quality is very akin to Runway’s text-to-image generator (which itself is the precursor to Stable Diffusion, if you think the video above looks similar to different slides).
The benefits to Runway’s model is you can make the video go for more than 10 seconds, where the other models are far more resticted. Users receive just over 100 seconds of video generation before the company asks you to sign up for one of the company’s paid subscriptions.
While Runway produces a much bigger quality video than the other two models can, it’s not anything more than a cute gimmick. Simply put, text-to-video is cool and fun, but it has a long way to go.
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Using Replicate’s standard vqgan engine on Pixray’s free site, I created two very confused images and one that could be construed as a modern art interpretation of what a desert looks like. It’s an older system and is still using features from generative adversarial network algorithms. That would be just one factor, but the images take a fair bit of time to process and even then their resolution is incredibly tiny.
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DeepAI’s rather simple and rudimentary AI generator doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, and despite all that it… doesn’t have much else going for it anyway. The text to image API system simply doesn’t have the bells and whistles more updated systems have. The images are more collages of images found on the internet than any real attempt at creating something “new.”
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Unlike some of its stock service contemporaries, Shutterstock has dived head first into AI generated content. The company started facilitating sale of AI content late last year and inked a deal with DALL-E creator OpenAI. To access the generator, users need to sign up for Shutterstock. While you can use the service to download images, those without a subscription still need to pay for each generated image, so it’s hard to call it truly “free.” So despite the images being somewhat better quality than others, that’s why it’s ending higher up on the list.
Earlier this year, Shutterstock released its DALL-E 2-based AI image generator. The service generates four images at about 500x500 pixel size, which is pretty sizable compared to some of its competing platforms. Users can set the output between five separate “styles” to make the generated image look “3D” or more like a digital photo.
Like all the other generators in this list, I used the most basic output possible, and I received a few surprising results. The system generated several rather interesting Under the Pendulum Sun inspired images, though like all AI image generators it clearly has problems with straight lines and latticework. The system took obvious inspiration from picture book style for its multiple renditions of A Memory Called Empire. It could almost be considered artistic, save for the misplaced arm and awkward shadow running along the woman’s back.
Another consideration is how Shutterstock claims it is using contributor’s photos and images to train the AI. The company has promised to compensate contributors whose images train the AI through a so-called “Contributor Fund.” Image contributo Source: Gizmodo