Over the course of the year 2022 and the beginning of the year 2023, we've been seeing a surge in the usage of AI in different aspects of digital life. While this is an interesting topic and definitely requires digging deeper into it, it can actually be very simple to get into AI and use its unlimited power to master your digital skills, give life to your ideas, and get help from them to achieve your goals faster without having to use human resources.
One such tool is AI art generators, which provide us with randomly generated images from our ideas. In this article, we will be exploring what AI image generators or, what their benefits are, how you can use them, and we will also share a ton of examples for you to get started easily.
AI art generators are tools that allow us to generate images from text or image prompts. But that is just a simple description and there's definitely a longer description coming. To put more specifically, AI art generators process data related to what we want to produce as images, process lots of data, and give us out some images or arts. While a lot of people might argue that these artworks are not actually considered art, we can consider them almost as close to art as we would see in an art created in just a few minutes by humans. So comparatively, it's been saving us, humans, a lot of time.
In this day and age, everybody wants to live a fast-paced life, and AI has given us the ability to achieve this. Hiring thousands of graphic designers and web designers is definitely a great thing, but with the power of AI, nowadays many people across the planet can freely learn about art and engage in artistic activities while before this would have only been limited to the group of people known as artists or designers.
In a way, AI has revolutionized the way we humans think about art and perceive art in our daily life. People who would have never known that they might be working with art on a day-to-day basis are now using AI art generators and similar AI tools to achieve their goals in various niches.
So it's important for us to learn how these tools work, optimize the way we work with them, and come up with the best solutions for our problems by saving us lots of time and money. In this article we will check in more detail what an AI art generator is capable of.
there is not only one type of an AI art generator, just as there isn't only one type of AI tool. Essentially, there are two main types of AI art generators out there that you can use right now. Let's see what they are and what they're capable of.
The first and most common type of AI art generator is the type that deals with textual prompts. Textual prompts mean sentences that you write verbally to communicate through the AI what exactly you are looking for and what you want to include in your image. A lot of people think that AI we'll just get creative and read your mind, but it's actually quite the opposite. You need to specify everything and not expect the AI to expand on your ideas. The AI might occasionally hallucinate or add some of its own touches, but it will never be able to read your mind. So the textural prompt allows the AI to fully understand what you're looking for and process the data that is available to it to put out an image according to what you're seeking.
The second type of AI image generator deals with visual prompts. This means that you can upload any type of image or video into the AI, and without using any textual input, or even using textual input, you can convey what you are looking for, and the AI simply attempts to replicate or redesign that image in a different style. So in this type, the generation is very limited and it will only transform the style of the photo. For example, if you add a realistic photo to the AI, it will return a photo of the same elements in the picture but in a cartoon or anime style. This is less common and fewer tools are providing such ability to us. However it might still be useful for fun or for people who want to have unique pictures using the same idea As their original picture, and the textural prompt might confuse the AI furthermore and take it farther than what you have in mind.
Now that we have checked both types of AI image generators, we should mention that in this article we believe focusing on the type of AI image generator from the text. This topic is vaster and will definitely require more digging into it. So if you want to master how to work with image generators from text, read on to get some good examples.
In this section, we'll check how AI art and image generators actually work. so you might be thinking that you simply input an image or text into the AI. However it is often not that simple, and you would have to provide some more details to the AI to understand exactly what you want. For example after you enter the text, and some tools you might have to specify the child of the photo, the aspect ratio, the resolution, and several other things. So the AI not only works with the text prompt, but also might require you to press a few buttons.
All of this data then gets sent to the AI itself to be processed against its massive library of assets, elements, example images, and the entire world wide web in some cases. Then, after having processed all the data it wants, the AI will output either one or several variations of the prompt you had in mind. Chances are you might not actually get a satisfactory result on the first try, and you might have to give the AI you're more tries until you get to the exact method that works for you to get the image you were hoping for originally. So if you don't immediately get the AI to output what you had in mind, or if the AI doesn't add many creative elements to your image, don't get disappointed and just continue testing.
Now, we know how AI image generators work and what they are. But let's see what the benefits of an AI art generator from text are, so we can get to an understanding of what we can possibly achieve with these AI generators. After all, we need to know what they are, how they may help us, and are they even effective or helpful in our daily life online.
First and foremost, AI art generators are amazing for providing you with inspirations regarding many aspects of your own design. Let's say you are a graphic designer and you are very tired of thinking, or watching mood boards on Dribbble, Behance, and Artstation. In that case, one of the best ways is for you to check out an AI art generator to get some inspirations regarding colors, contrast, ideas on how to position different elements on the screen, ideas on how to illustrate different characters, etc. The AI might not be that creative, but it can give you some ideas on how to place things on the screen or you might even give you some sparks regarding how you yourself would transform something that the AI created somewhere to a real thing. For example, the AI might place a random circle somewhere on the image. In that case, you might get an inspiration to actually turn that circle into a button or something like that.
But that's not all. You might get inspiration for an entire image as well. This is especially if you are not an advanced graphic designer, and you are simply trying to generate some ideas as a beginner. If you don't want to directly use the images that the AI outputs, this is an excellent way to get started and illustrate or just create artworks.
Secondly, AI art generators are great for use in marketing. Let's not forget that most marketers, and especially affiliate marketers, are not really familiar with the visual aspect of marketing. So it might be very expensive and even time-consuming for them to think of doing a design for their advertisement or their branding. In that case, AI art generators are super helpful for you as a marketer to use instantly and modify just a little bit to feel a little human. Experience has shown that most people will not immediately recognize an AI-generated image. They might not even suspect that it is AI generated until somebody mentions that it is. And even in that case, it does not connote any negative or bad impression. It is simply how you prefer your marketing strategy to be.
In many cases, marketers can even get to what they have in mind much quicker and get on with their marketing before it is too late. Waiting on a graphic designer could take too long, Speaking of which, we get to the next benefit of AI art generators.
Now, we have reached the part where we talk about saving money and time. Imagine having to illustrate something or getting some visuals for your marketing or even your small business. Many people might not have tools to illustrate something, and even more, people might not know how to work with visual tools like Photoshop or Adobe illustrator. In that case, AI comes to the rescue by giving you an opportunity to immediately produce an image that will look as good as a human-generated image. Therefore, there is no need for you to visit Upwork and spend hours curating and interviewing different graphic designers to find somebody who can help you with a quick task. In that case, you can simply use an AI to achieve your goals in the shortest time.
As a small business or just as a person who hasn't started trying to make money online, you might not have a lot of budget to dedicate to hiring different people for your team or even to help you. In that case, AI image generators and other AI tools are great to give you a kick start on your business. Some AI tools are so good that you might be able to use them without anybody understanding that the image is AI-generated. Some of the tools might even educate you on editing the images to make them look even more human. We will get to this more in the later sections.
Now that we know the benefits of AI art generators, we know how they work, and you know what they are. Let's investigate the standard features of AI art generators along with some examples of how those features are implemented in different tools.
The first and most important feature of an AI image generator from text is the ability to generate art from a text prompt. So, most tools will have a box for text where you can enter your text prompt, and some other ones might allow you to choose the prompt using buttons or options under the tool. In this way, they don't actually have much processing power, and they might only be able to generate images from very basic inputs.
The second feature of AI image generators includes generating several variations for a single prompt. In this case, you can see that the tool will output not only one image that it thinks matches your prompt, but several images, usually up to four, and you will have the ability to select and choose one of those images as your choice. Because not all the time will the AI output something exactly according to what you want. So by choosing the image you think is closer to what you think the AI will learn, it will evolve to understand your preferences.
Now, as mentioned in the previous future, while you can produce several variations for prompts in many different tools, you will also have the ability to enhance one of those images to have a higher quality. So consider the AI image generator as a tool that will give you your image in a few extra steps, but in each step, it makes sure that it is getting closer to what you have in mind. One such example can be seen in an AI image generator like MidJourney which allows you to choose and enhance one of the images out of the four images it outputs for every prompt. It will also output a new prompt based on your choice among those four and your preferences. In this case, the AI will make sure that the image you will get at the end will match the exact output you had in mind. With this, AI can learn to improve over time.
it might not be that common for most AI tools to generate videos from a prompt, but it is definitely possible that you might see this feature in some of them. So they are tools that allow you to either upload a photo or choose a photo that you created from your prompts. To generate a video from that prompt you could either add several photos or just add one photo and ask the AI to animate it for you. This is especially great and it has been getting a lot of attention on social media lately.
Now, this might also be very rare, but you might be able to choose very few buttons and generate a simple photo without a prompt.
What are the main usages of AI-generated images for a long time with their use as NFTs. NF's were booming for a long time, and a lot of people made huge sales with them. At some point, when the EAI image generators came out, almost everybody started using them for generating NFTS, because many people were not familiar with graphic design before, and they saw AI generated images as an opportunity to make money online buyers selling to their NFT collections. Many tools actually allow you to generate NFT's on demand with the tool, because in order to generate an NFT, you actually need some blockchain knowledge and probably some fee for the money. However these tools do it for you for free, and you can share them with anybody you like.
Of course, just like any other image editing tool or image-related tool , you will be able to download the images you produce in several formats.
Let's say you are a big team and you want to use AI-generated images all the time from marketing or different things. Let's say you have graphic designers and developers you want to download these images regularly and have access to. In that case, some tools might be able to provide you with the ability to manage all the photos you create on their platform and use them whenever you want.
It is amazing how AI is evolving nowadays to the point that it can now process requests to modify an image. So let's say you create an image and you feel like something has to change. For example you want the bicycle to turn into a tricycle. In that case, we can simply ask the AI in some tools to change that element over that part of the image you want to change to be updated. The AI will take that new request, merge it with the previous one, and output an entirely new result for you.
A few tools allow you to edit images on their platform which is great, because you won't have to use Photoshop or any other tools for editing your images. This is especially if you're a graphic designer and you just want to make a few modifications on an AI generated image to make it look less AI. In that case you can simply use the platform itself to make some quick changes. Even though these abilities might not yet be that advanced, it is good enough to be used as beginners.
Now, let's say you actually only want to accept one part of the image, because it is too good and you are scared that the AI might regenerate it and you might lose it. In that case, you can ask the AI to crop a certain part of the image that looks better or more realistic, and I'll put it as a more enhanced section from the image.
Notice how in the example above, we’ve removed the small detail on the table and modified the image to look better. We simply picked the eraser tool and erased it, then asked the AI to re-generate it.
Of course, this would be one of the most important features, but since in most textual prompts you get to enter the image or art style yourself, we'll just mention that some tools allow you to choose the image or art style outside of the text input. So you will have some buttons available to you where you can see options for the art styles. If you don't know all the different art styles, this can be very helpful to you.
As developers, if you want to implement an AI art tool on your website in a way that it works dynamically with your website, or you want to do experimentations on the AI, some AI art generators provide you with the ability to get access to their API so you can do whatever you want as a developer. Keep in mind that some of these AI tools might charge you some money for your usage as a developer for using their API.
so now you know that AI image generators are amazing. But where can you actually use them and what are their actual use cases? Here are some of the top usages of AI image generators that are showing their affectivity in the daily life of people online.
First and foremost, image generators have done miracles for the world of marketing and advertising. They are amazing because they provide advertisers and marketers with the ability to produce their own visuals for their better ads, videos, and almost everything else. This is great and you can actually see the effect of AI on marketing nowadays. Instead of having to prepare visuals or even have products ready, you can simply add a human element to your advertisements without having to use somebody else's face on your ad.
For a while, this was booming pretty hard. In a way that many people started generating images with AI to upload to their NFT collections. Well this is an amazing way to make money, this became too obsolete or let's say too overpopulated very soon. Even though you still have the chance to make money through NFTs made with AI, you should understand that the competition is much higher right now and we need to have really good ideas. Alternatively, you can mix different AI tools to get to more unique AI-generated artwork and have a higher chance at selling NFTs.
Lots of people have already started using web design or web graphic cases to prove how you can benefit from AI in your web and graphic design projects. This works in a way that you either generate the web design completely from scratch using AI, which would mean generating the UI and UX website or an application. Of course, this cannot be directly used on a website, because the AI cannot yet fully understand professional web design. However, it can act as a great inspiration for UI and UX designers. Alternatively, as web designers and web developers, you can use these AI-generated photos to populate your web pages and make them look less robotic. So instead of adding more text, add more easily generated visuals from these AI tools.
You have mentioned this before, but AI-generated images have started really affecting the graphic design market. This works in a way that graphic designers have started getting inspiration from AI to illustrate their artworks digitally or even offline, edit AI-generated photos to get to more interesting images, and even just directly use them in their graphic design.
Of course, graphic design in this sense would mean in many different industries, from web design all the way to package design and industrial design.
Many businesses have already started using AI to generate ideas for their brand name, including color, logo inspirations, etc. This is great especially for marketers and graphic designers, because the AI might actually give them some ideas for their local types and local faces. AIs sometimes even inspire us to create some new fonts for our businesses. Amazingly, many small businesses and even large businesses have started using AI to get ideas for their brand name, even if not using the idea directly. This is probably one of the most widespread usages of AI for the business side.
Bet you have definitely come across several social media pages where you doubted whether the page uses AI-generated photos or videos or not. These pages usually get massive audiences very quickly as well, because they keep posting regularly, and that is only possible with the power of AI.
The only lesson we can get from this here is that the ease of producing images using AI has made lots of businesses successful on social media, because it allows them to create more creative ideas and visuals more quickly, and allows them to invest more time actually coming up with new posts and updating their audience regularly. Many people have done case studies on YouTube and other platforms showcasing how they managed to gain lots of subscribers simply using AI-generated images in their videos.
Of course, stock photos are not always free, and graphic designers, content writers, and almost everybody online always use stock photos. Let's say you want to add a stock photo of a van in nature. In that case, you would either have to use somebody's photo online who mentions that they don't want you to use it for commercial usage, or you would have to download something two million other people have already downloaded. This takes uniqueness away from your content and makes it worthless. However, using AI to generate stock photos from your ideas that you want to present on your blog or social media, is really great to stay unique and show some new visuals to your audience.
In this section, we'll be sharing several tips for you to get on top of the game of using yeah image generators using text. As mentioned before, it can take you lots of time and experimentation to actually get to a result that you like. In order to eliminate that time trial and experimentation and make it essentially last for only the first or second trial, you need to use the tips mentioned below to have the most accurate outcome from your AI images.
First and foremost column the longer your prompts, the more detailed your images. That has been accepted as a universal rule for using AI image generators with text prompts . This means that the more you describe the image and the longer your prompt is, the more details the AI will implement in the design, and the more elements will be very clearly visible in the picture.
In this case, more is not less, but more.
So for example if you want to describe a happy dog sitting in a land with a butterfly on his nose, you would instead have to write something like “a dog sitting in a land filled with short-cut green grass, sun shining over the dog, in the background, there are hills and mounts in brown and gray, the dog is a golden retriever and a butterfly is sitting on his nose, while the dog is looking happily and curiously at the butterfly. The butterfly is blue and black. Super realistic 4k” to get an actual response that clearly shows what you had in mind.
As humans, we can instantly think of some ideas that come up but putting them to paper is hard. The good thing about AI is that it does it for you instantly.
Now, as mentioned in the previous tip, you need to use longer projects. This doesn't mean that you only need to write to reach a maximum or minimum word count. This means that you need to specify every single detail you want the image to have. For example, if you want your image to be about “cool girl wearing cyberpunk intricate streetwear” write “cool girl wearing cyberpunk intricate streetwear, beautiful, detAIled portrAIt, intricate complexity, by krenz cushart, kyoto animation, greg rutkowski, wlop. 4k, beautiful, cinematic dramatic atmosphere”, which will result in the following image.
This example only shows that if you don't specify the details, the AI will likely not put any emphasis on the elements not mentioned, and he will only emphasize on the elements mentioned. In that case, it may hallucinate or fail to connect the dots and understand why certain parts of the image should be connected to each other, while in your human mind, all of those things are clearly connected with each other either at a social level or cultural level. So for the AI, you need to specify every single detail no matter how small or easy or unnoticeable they are.
What are the first and most important mistakes that many people make when dealing with AI in the generators is that they expect the AI to be more creative than them. Unfortunately, the AI will only be as creative as your input. So it will not put any more detail or sophisticated additions to your image. Basically, if you don't know what you want, there is a good chance the AI won't know what you want either. So trying to get the AR to add grass in the image while you never mention grass will almost never happen. This causes you to likely use up all your free credits on AI generation tools, which you want to avoid.
you could just go on without specifying image quality, but there is a good chance that you will actually get a higher-quality image if you mention it in your prompt. For example, mention that you wanted your image to be 4K or any other resolution, and you wanted it to be high quality. This makes the AI understand what type of image exactly you want, and helps it output a more accurate image.
Besides the image quality, you also have to specify the artist's style. So for example, you need to mention whether you want your photo to be in vintage style, anime, cartoonish, blooming, black and white, etc. Again, not mentioning this, will only make the AI output a generated photo in any style it wants, and you will not be able to get the exact result you want out of it. So make sure to mention the artist's side as well. If you don't know about artist styles, you can learn about them by a quick search on the Internet.
So, in case the platform allows you to enhance your photos, always remember that you should take several steps to enhance the photo as much as you can to get a more accurate, more detailed, higher quality, and better photo that actually matches your original input. You can simply do these in several tools by selecting an image and asking the AR to modify it to be more enhanced.
you have mentioned some tips for getting more accurate results from these AI image generators. But here are some top tips and creative ideas for actually using AI art to be more successful.
Recently, we've been seeing a lot of people do experiments with different AI. So what they do is that they go on some AI language models and AI text editors, and they ask them to come up with some ideas for inputting into AI image generators. For example, if you have some ideas about your business, or if you have just created the lyrics to a song using an AI text generator, you can ask the AI to come up with some prompts for the cover image of the song or the lyrics. The AI will output several prompts and it thinks will properly give you an accurate result on the Image generator.
Next, you can put that prompt into the AI image generator to get some results from it. This means you won't have to intervene in anything, and the output result would mainly have been created by the sole use of AI.
You can make really interesting videos, if you simply use AI-generated photos and text together on videos in short form, for example on TikTok and Instagram. As a matter of fact, a lot of people are doing these experiments on TikTok where they take AI-generated photos along with some interesting content to make short-form videos that users can quickly watch. While a lot of people don't understand that these videos are actually AI-generated, they perform very well and they manage to keep their identity hidden.
In many cases, especially in the case of marketing, you might be able to grab many users' attention using AI photos. AI-generated photos are well known for being extra and weird. So using these photos, even if they are not human-like, and even if they are funny, can really benefit you in marketing or even just getting some online attention.
Many people use photos while marketing or posting ads on different platforms like Twitter or Instagram where many users are interested in AI-generated images. You need to get to know the platform of choice, and the audience most active on it. Instagram and Twitter tend to have the most interested audience in AI-generated visuals. So using these images and even memes created with them, you can get lots of user attention to your profile.
Last but not least, don't forget to use AI images with other AR tools. For example, you can get an AI image generated by a text prompt that you've enhanced or have not enhanced and upload into an AI image generator from the image, and get an entirely new result.
You might even be able to enter your images in an AI sound generator and produce a song or soundtrack from that image alone. You might be able to create an image and ask an AI text generator to write a poem or a song about that image. There are essentially so many things you can do by using these AI tools back and forth to get the best result out of them.
Now we come to the part where you actually have to choose an AI art generator. For your information, most of these AI image generators are not free, and you actually have to pay them either by usage or on a monthly basis. There has been a lot of effort put into these tools, so it's not possible for you to use all of them at the same time. So you should choose one and stick to it. Therefore, in this section, we're gonna go through some factors that can help you to choose an AI arch generator properly.
First and foremost, we need to check the pricing. Different AI art generators might have different pricing points and that just makes the whole thing very different. For example, you can see some of the top AI art generators and their pricing models come off for you to compare which one is worth using. You can also see how many free trials you get on each of the platforms.
AI Art Generator | Pricing |
DALL-E | $15 for 115 generations (credits) |
Stable Diffusion | Free |
Fotor | Free trial / Pro plan starting at $9 a month |
MidJourney | Free trial for around 20 generations / Paid plan starting at $10 a month |
These AI art generators are not free, as mentioned before. Therefore, many of them might have limitations set up for you to use for free. So if you don't plan on paying for these tools, you have to understand the limitations that each of them have. For example, in some cases, you might only be able to generate 5 images before you have to pay for the tool, and in other cases, you might get up to 50 trials for creating images. In the table above in the pricing section, we have included the trial model for each two, so you can properly compare them.
Last but not least, you must compare the quality of several tools. This is not something that can be proven in one or two problems but in the experience of many different users. Generally, you should go for the main tools, as they usually use the most advanced and up-to-date AI models. For example, OpenAI’s DALL-E is regularly updated to have the latest AI model. This is the same with other popular tools like Stable Diffusion. Some of these tools even use the same AI algorithm in the background. So generally, aim for the most popular tools to get the latest updates on their database and be able to use the latest technologies.
Conclusion
By now, you should have a complete understanding of what AI image generators are, what they can do, how you can benefit from them, how you can use them online, etcetera. Using these tips and tools will put you in the right place to get started on using these tools. So all you really have to do is open one of these tools that you like and prefer, check out their limitations and a free trial, and then simply use the tips mentioned here like writing longer prompts and specifying all the details to get the exact result you want out of the AI-generated image.
At the end of the day, you might be able to use these results while marketing, designing, or even just casually enjoying them for fun. We have talked about how you can use AI art generators for business, but these tools can definitely be cool for character design, game concept design, and many other creative projects as well. This technology can help us advance further into the world of graphic design, so you can get started right away to be a part of it from the very beginning.