The best AI image generators currently available

From Pope Francis in a puffer jacket to Wes Anderson-inspired movie trailers, AI-generated images are becoming more common across the web. It’s not hard to see why – modern AI tools have become so compelling that their images have even won prestigious photography awards. You also don’t have to be a talented artist or photographer to create beautiful art. If you’ve ever used a chatbot like ChatGPT or Bing Chat, you’ll feel right at home with one of the best AI image generators.

To generate an AI image, all you need is a text prompt that describes the scene you have in mind. For example, in one of the images below, I used the “Golden Hour New York City Skyline with Towering Skyscrapers and Busy Streets” prompt. However, your imagination can get much wilder with detailed prompts specifying every single intricate detail.

With those capabilities in mind, here is our list of the best AI image generators currently available. We will update this list as technology evolves.

The best AI image generators

From free to paid, and simple to complex, you’ll quickly learn that no two AI image generators work the same. In fact, almost all of them also differ in terms of the underlying machine learning models. This means that identical prompts will produce different results depending on the generator used. For this purpose you have the following options:

While Midjourney wasn’t the first AI image generator, it has now become the go-to choice for many. This is because Midjourney’s latest V5 iteration has overtaken most of the competition. In some cases, the results can look photorealistic, albeit with some minor flaws that reveal AI heritage.

Unlike most of the other services on this list, you can’t access Midjourney through a website or app. Instead, you’ll need to use Discord – the chat app widely used for gaming communities. That’s not a bad thing, however, as Discord runs on all major platforms, including a web browser. To get started, simply create an account and join the Midjourney Discord server. You may have to accept the terms of service before you can begin, but that’s the only barrier to entry.

New members can only generate a limited number of free images (about 25) as part of a free trial. However, Midjourney disables the free trial during periods of heavy traffic. The cheapest way to use the service is with a $10 monthly subscription. You can save a little more if you commit to a full year subscription. Unfortunately, this tier still only grants you about 200 images per month.

While you can use Midjourney with simple prompts containing just a few words (or even an emoji), its real power lies in the parameters. For example, you can specify an aspect ratio of 16:9 --ar parameters or create anime style images with --niji.

DALL-E was the first generative AI to break into the mainstream upon its launch in 2021. The latest version, DALL-E 2, takes things to another level with better language understanding skills and higher quality images. It can also edit existing images, allowing you to replace or add entirely new objects.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, developed DALL-E. The company used its large language model GPT-3 as a basis, which explains how the image generator understands your prompts.

Using DALL-E is very simple and straightforward. You need an OpenAI account, which you may already have if you’ve ever used ChatGPT. Once logged in, you can type your prompt in the text box and click to generate Button.

Each image you create costs one credit. Unfortunately, however, DALL-E no longer offers new users the opportunity to receive free credits. This practice ended in April 2023, so if you create an account today you will need to buy credits. You have to top up $15 each time, resulting in 115 credits. That’s roughly 13 cents per use, which isn’t bad at all for one of the best AI image generators out there.

However, you can still use DALL-E for free via Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Scroll down to learn more about how to do this.

Unlike the other AI image generators on this list, Stable Diffusion is completely free and open source. If you have a powerful computer with a dedicated graphics card, you can even download and run the model yourself. Even better, it works completely offline. However, this is not an option for everyone as the minimum requirements call for a GPU with 8GB of VRAM. That disqualifies most non-gaming or non-workstation computers.

The good news? You can use Stable Diffusion to generate images entirely in your web browser. Just visit the StableDiffusionOnline website and enter a command prompt. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

You don’t need an account, but your results will be saved and visible to others. For maximum privacy, you must run the model on your own computer. You cannot view your personal generation history either, so it is only intended for one-time use. However, the platform allows you to browse previous prompts and their results. This can come in handy when you lack artistic inspiration.

While StableDiffusionOnline from the section above works well enough for a free service, it’s not very feature-rich. For example, you cannot resize the image or edit it after generation. But fortunately, the makers of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, have just the solution in the form of DreamStudio.

As soon as you open DreamStudio, you’ll notice that it looks like a polished app with lots of buttons and sliders. You can create multiple images at once (or fewer), change the aspect ratio, omit certain elements in your AI-generated masterpiece, and more. DreamStudio also offers different “styles” covering everything from photorealism to origami and comic book looks.

Additionally, you can add and remove objects in your AI-generated images using the Edit tab. For example, try using the eraser to erase certain parts of the image. Then type a command prompt to fill in the blank.

As an official and highly polished product, DreamStudio costs money to use. But the good news is that you get 25 free credits when you sign up, which gets you 125 generations. In addition, the minimum purchase of $10 grants you $1,000 tokens or approximately 5,000 AI-generated images.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine received a powerful new chat mode shortly after the release of ChatGPT. It’s only gotten more powerful since then, as the company also added a free AI image generator to the mix. The service, called Bing Image Creator, now has its own page with ideas and instructions on how to use it.

Since Microsoft works closely with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, it’s no surprise that Bing’s Image Creator uses DALL-E under the hood. That means if you run out of free credits on one platform, you can easily switch to another.

When you sign in with your Microsoft account, the Image Creator automatically grants you 100 “Boosts”. These are essentially credits that you can use to create a new image almost instantly. Boosts are automatically replenished every week and you cannot pay for more credits at this time. What happens when you run out of boosts? As the name suggests, you will have to wait much longer. But the good news is that you can still create an unlimited number of images for free.

You can also access the image maker through vanilla Bing Chat, even on mobile. Just switch to creative mode and start your prompt with “Generate an image from…”. This method follows the same limit as the chatbot for now, at 200 conversation threads per day.

That’s it for our list of the best AI image generators available today. Have you used any of these yet? Let us know which one you would use over the competition in the survey below.