MicheleRecently an artificial intelligence managed to recreate a endless conversation mimicking the way two philosophers speak and reason. This is a clear example of the level of sophistication that artificial intelligence has reached: not only robotic intelligence to carry out small daily tasks such as lifting objects and opening drawers, or monitoring the progress of company production, but also real artistic production.
AI that creates images
AI image creation is just the latest frontier of this unstoppable progress: a machine is now capable of creating beautiful and detailed images, indistinguishable for some from those conceived by a digital artist.
Some might argue that an art critic would recognize the difference… Maybe that's true, but it has also happened that an AI has deceived a human being and managed to win. an art competition.
Practical applications
If we go beyond the purely artistic aspect, we see many practical advantages related to the possibility of automatically creating new images on a large scale. The first to benefit will be the mass production of works of fiction: we are talking about stock photos, or illustrations for comics or books, which can be created starting from a simple text input.
The digital artist will no longer have to create each individual frame or drawing, then commission apprentices or technicians to reproduce this model on a large scale.
In some cases, especially for secondary characters or less important and repetitive scenarios, you won't even have to invent the figure from scratch: some textual input will suffice.
In short, thanks to AI and its level of creativity and detail, it is now possible to delegate the most mechanical tasks of artistic production to a computer.
But a wide range of applications opens up if we consider that AI can also be trained to edit existing images.
Let's think about the huge work of correcting a series of images, which perhaps only need a small change. For example, they could be corporate images with a logo, or illustrations and comics. AI can also be useful if we wanted to apply some form of graphic censorship to a series of images containing sensitive data - think of photographs containing license plate numbers of vehicles, for example, or the features of minors.
But how does the computer manage to modify the images by accurately intuiting the instruction received?
And above all: how can he put into action the complex and delicate process of creation?
If we want, the computer does like the great painters of antiquity: it goes to the workshop and learns from the best, thanks to machine learning.
What is Machine Learning?
Machine learning or auto-learning is considered a subfield of the broader field of artificial intelligence.
The main purpose of machine learning is to create algorithms that can find patterns of common behavior in a set of data - much like a statistical model does. In computer science, machine learning is applied to computers that must learn from data on their own, without the need for explicit instructions.
Machine learning is not only used to edit and create images, but also in medicine, or in speech and text recognition.
Its effects are sometimes quite disturbing, as in the case of a digital artist who trained AI to tell the story of evolution. After the monkey and Homo Sapiens Sapiens, AI has inserted a cyborg, as the last link in human evolution.
The tool was instructed to create images that represented the history of evolution, but the result was perceived as rather disturbing. It should be remembered that the AI did not “think” about the input by itself: at each stage of human development, the digital artist who created the video “instructed” the tool textually, and it then created the images and sequenced them in a video. So, even if it remains a perhaps disturbing image, it should be remembered that it was the artist who spoke of humanoid robots, and therefore for now no robot revolution is underway, for now.
The 7 best tools for generating images with artificial intelligence
The good news for those who want to try their hand at this kind of creation is that there are several tools, even online, to generate images with artificial intelligence.
We have collected them below, listing the features and strengths for those who have fun, those who work in the field of content creation and NFTs, for developers but also for online entrepreneurs who want to integrate AI into their software or apps via API.
Most of the tools in this list work via text input.
Council: If you want to get a more detailed image that is similar to what you have in mind, consult online guides on how to insert understandable prompts for the chosen software.
Have fun!
1) Mid-journey
Ideal for: generate the highest quality images
Input: textual
Cost: free for the first 25 images, after that you need take out a subscription (starting at $10/month).
Midjourney has a very high quality in the basic rendering of images. It works through bots that you can interact with via a chat in the Discord app. Since it is a software that is not yet distributed, to try it you need to register on the waiting list linked above and wait to receive an invitation. At the end of the trial period, you will be offered subscription plans of various prices, in order to continue using the software.
This is the best tool ever for generating complex images of significant artistic value, as demonstrated by the fact that an image generated with Midjourney won an art contest.
2) FROM-E 3
Ideal for: edit image details
Input: textual
Cost: free, when used with ChatGPT.
Dall-E 3 is an open AI project that takes the form of software available by invitation only, or by joining the waiting list linked above.
A cutting-edge software that allows you to create 4 images at a time of the highest quality, but above all that allows you to take an image, select a portion of it and give textual instructions to the software to modify only that portion of the image.
A cutting-edge feature that simplifies much of the digital artist's work.
3) Photo
Ideal for: who wants to generate art NFT
Input: images
Cost: for watermarked images the tool is free. To remove the watermark subscriptions start at $8,99 per month.
Fotor Go Art is a very useful platform for those who want to launch themselves into the NFT market. Here, in fact, following a convenient text input, not only does the AI generate pleasant and detailed images, but it can also convert them into NFTs that can be sold on the international market.
Fotor allows even those who are new to developing or creating digital art to try their hand at creating art in an intuitive way.
4) Photosonic
Ideal for: copywriters and web content creators
Input: text, image
Cost: Free plan, or basic plan starting at $10
The most interesting aspect of Photosonic is the great variety of different artistic styles and techniques.
Photosonic in fact offers a remarkable variety of output images, and this makes it suitable for those who create web content and do not want to risk creating a non-original image.
5) Jasper Art
Ideal for: who wants to try AI in the round
Input: text input
Cost: from $20/month. There are no free plans.
Jasper Art is extremely intuitive and also contains easy tutorials to set up the final output of the images. You can generate 4 images at a time, choosing the style, the “mood” and the reference artists, and other similar elements.
It is a tool available online, and it also accepts input in Italian, although in English it understands more complex texts.
In addition to providing image service, Jasper Art allows you to create texts.
6) Artbreeder
Ideal for: who wants fidelity to the original image, but also a well-defined output style
Input: image and text
Cost: freemium, or from $8,99 per month
In addition to being very advanced in the intuition of text commands, Artbreeder allows you to draw a raw image from which the AI can take inspiration to create the final result. It is a tool perhaps less intuitive than the previous ones, but it allows you to give more detailed instructions to the AI to obtain exactly the kind of image you have in mind.
7) Big Sleep
Ideal for: Python developers
Input: Python code
Cost: free
Big Sleep is a repository, which requires specific knowledge of the Python programming language (you can find it your Github).
After installing Big Sleep with
you can create the file to get the final image:
<from big_sleep import Imagine dream = Imagine( text = "Pizero logo", lr = 5e-2; save_every = 10, save_progress = True ) dream() >
The result does not have the same definition and creativity of other AIs such as those of Jasper Art or MidJourney, but it can be useful to have APIs to integrate with other web apps or software, or projects.
