AI art is artwork made through artificial intelligence (AI). This type of art is unique in that the artist’s computer program creates the work autonomously with the human input only in the form of text and variable inputs.
Through artificial intelligence, these apps can generate new pieces of art in various styles and mediums. With AI image generators, you can now create portraits, landscapes, and abstract art that reflect the styles of famous artists or that are entirely new.
This technology has tons of possibilities and is changing how we think about the art creation process because machine learning allows artists to take their craft to a new and strange level.
The best AI art generators
- Mid Journey
- Leonardo AI
- Adobe Firefly
- Google Imagen 3
- Stable Diffusion
- Dall E2
- Lensa
- Avatar AI
Mid Journey – Best overall
Mid journey is an independent research lab that produces a artificial intelligence program called “Stable Diffusion.” The tool currently takes textual descriptions and creates images, similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E. Right now, the beta version of Stable Diffusion is open for anyone to use.
To get started with Mid Journey you’ll need to join their Discord and then through the Discord you’ll get access to the AI tools to generate images. New users can create up to 25 images then you’ll need to subscribe to full access to the bot to create additional images. The current pricing can be found here.
Overall Mid Journey is quite impressive though my be a bit technical for new users who are not familiar with how a Discord channel works as you type in prompts directly to the bot to generate images.
Pros:
- With a paid account, you can create 200 images a month for commercial use.
Cons:
- A bit awkward to use at first and has a learning curve with regards to the prompt engineering required to get your desired output.
Leonardo AI – Best for marketing material
Offering a sleek, web-based interface that’s intuitive and visually organized. Leonardo AI makes it accessible for beginners and professionals alike. This platform provides a quick onboarding tutorial and a variety of options (e.g., AI Canvas, Texture Generation) directly accessible from the homepage.
This platform excels in producing high-resolution, photorealistic images, making it ideal for professional applications like graphic design, gaming, advertising, and fashion. It’s a popular choice for marketers looking to quickly create material for YouTube, X and websites.
Overall, Leonardo AI is better for photorealistic, professional-grade images with a focus on customization, while Midjourney (my top pick) leads in artistic, vibrant, and experimental outputs with superior variety and detail for creative prompts.
Pros:
- Excellent tool to replace your graphic designer. Ideal for helping you create images for marketing purposes. Think posts on YouTube, X, blog posts or parasite SEO.
Cons:
- Works by way of a credit system. Can create up to 15 images daily otherwise you’ll need to upgrade to a paid account if you’re a power user.
Adobe Firefly – Almost on par with Mid Journey
Adobe Firefly is built with Adobe’s Sensei platform (their own internal generative AI). It’s trained on using a mix of images from Creative Commons, Wikimedia, and Flickr Commons, not to mention a staggering 300 million images and videos from Adobe Stock and the public domain.
This tool taps into image datasets to generate a wide range of designs. Plus, it learns from user feedback and fine-tunes its designs accordingly. Also, this software tool can do the following:
- Text to image – Standard image generation based on text.
- Generative fill – Remove objects or create new ones from text.
- Text effects – Apply styles and textures
- Generative recolor – Recolor a vector graphic.
- 3D to image – Create a 3D image from text.
- Text to vector – Create SVGs with text.
Adobe Firefly offers an intuitive, beginner friendly interface that makes it easy for users of all skill levels to create beautiful and unique designs. With its advanced algorithms, it can generate endless variations of a single design concept, saving designers countless hours of work while still maintaining the highest level of quality.
In addition to its impressive set of features, Adobe Firefly is constantly evolving through updates and new releases. This ensures that users have access to the latest tools and techniques, allowing them to stay ahead of the curve in the constantly changing world of design.
Pros:
- Images are good, not as good as Mid Journey however but they are catching up quick.
- A very helpful suite of image tools, beyond just text to image.
- Can use for commercial use with a paid account.
Cons:
- Free accounts can make images, but those images have a watermark.
- The paid plan is based on credits, you get 100 credits a month. Most features cost 1 generative credit so you need to be thoughtful with how you spend your credits.
Google Imagen 3
Dall E3 – Realistic images from a prompt (built into ChatGPT)
DALL·E 2 can create never-before-seen images and art by reading and understanding a text description. It then combine these concepts, attributes, and styles to produce new content. Not only does this AI fill in the gaps of an image, it can also expand the existing borders to create new compositions.
With this tool, you can edit existing images by simply writing a caption in natural language. It’s easy to add and remove elements, and the shadows, reflections, and textures are all accounted for. With this tool, you also can take an image and create different variations of it that are inspired by the original.
Finally, DALL·E 2 uses diffusion to gradually recreate an image from a series of random dots. It does this by recognizing specific patterns in the image and replicating them with the dots.
Pros:
- Can generate weird, creative images.
Cons:
- You’ll need to practice with different prompts for best results.
- You’ll get a few free credits to try them out, after which you’ll need to buy credits going forward.
Lensa – Create stunning avatar images
Never worry about your selfies looking less than perfect again with Lensa. With this app, you can quickly and easily edit your photos to look better than ever before, and then some. This is the simplest and most practical mobile app available for improving your selfie images or just outright letting the AI reimagine your picture.
Lensa is not just an AI app for pictures, it’s also a highly functional image editor with advanced filters and features allowing you to make adjustments to your skin, eyes, background and more. They also have an auto adjust that does everything for you as well.
Avatar AI – Create your profile pic
Created by Levels.io, Avatar AI let’s you get over 120 AI Avatars in a variety of styles, both festive and year-round. They make for great gifts for you or a loved one! You can also use the avatars as profile pictures or social media posts.
The app is high quality and easy to use. Plus, your data is deleted within 24 hours so you don’t have to worry about it being sold without your knowledge like other apps do. Finally, they implement location specific pricing so it’s more affordable depending on your location.
Playground AI
PlaygroundAI offers users searching for artistic exploration and inspiration precisely what they want. This powerful platform has a wide range of customization options, and the art produced is commercially-usable. It’s also built on top of Stable Diffusion as well.
With its wide range of customization options like adding filters, having the AI expand your prompt to something more specific or being able to tell the AI to exclude certain things from the image. This powerful platform allows users to explore their creativity and produce images that are not just for personal use but can also be commercially-usable.
So what sets PlaygroundAI apart from other similar platforms?
First off, users can create a free account and are provided with a helpful tutorial on how to use this platform. Images generated on a free account also have no watermark and are high resolution. Also, this platform uses cutting-edge deep learning algorithms to generate unique and high-quality art pieces based on the user’s inputs.
You can write a prompt in the respective section, modify any options on the sidebars, and then click Generate to have the AI create your required art.
Moreover, PlaygroundAI also offers a wide range of tutorials and guides to help users navigate the platform and make the most out of its features. Whether you’re new to digital art or an experienced designer, these resources are valuable tools for improving your skills and creating even more impressive artwork.
Overall, PlaygroundAI is a very powerful, fun platform that combines advanced AI technology with a user-friendly interface and a supportive community. It opens up endless possibilities for artists, designers, and content creators by allowing them to create images for commercial purposes.
Pros:
- High quality images and no watermarks.
Cons:
- Free accounts are limited as to how many images they can make.
- Only text to image, but it’s very good.
Canva – Image editor with AI tools
Canva is beginner friendly with a no-frills interface. Integrates seamlessly with Canva’s design tools for quick social media or blog visuals. You get text-to-image, style options (photo, drawing, painting), and AI-powered “magic tools” to add, replace or modify existing photos.
The only drawback of Canva is that images generated with Canva are not as realistic as my top choices. Instead, I like to use Canva as a way to edit images created with other image generation tools as the magic tool features are quite powerful with their ability to creatively modify any existing image.
How do AI Art Generators work?
All the generators on this list work by way of entering a text prompt and setting specific constraints to the artistic style of the image.
To actually create the AI art, algorithms are written in a way where they are not constrained to a set of rules to follow, but rather they are designed to gain an understanding of specific aesthetics by analyzing thousands of images. The algorithm then creates new images that adhere to the aesthetics it has learned.
Best AI Art Generators – Conclusion
So that’s it for my guide on the best AI image generators for commercial purposes. From creating avatars for your online bio, to full suite image editing software, you have a wide range of options for using AI to create images for your online work.
- Photorealism: Midjourney or Leonardo AI for stunning, detailed visuals.
- Commercial Use: Adobe Firefly or Canva for safe, licensed images.
- Beginners: Canva or Google Imagen 3 for ease of use and free access.
- Editing Control: Adobe Firefly or DALL-E 3 for precise tweaks and integration.
- Budget-Friendly: Leonardo AI or Google Imagen 3 for generous free tiers.
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