10 Best Artificial Intelligence Art Generators: How to use AI to create art
We are all for humans collaborating with artificial intelligence to create incredible art. AI provides an immense potential to enhance, extend, and completely revolutionize creative processes.
AI art generators can create artworks in styles of various periods and cultures within seconds, based on a few prompts fed to the algorithm. Here’s a list of the best AI art generators you can utilize to create art.
In a nutshell: There’s plenty of AI art generators offering free as well as paid services for you to create astounding art simply by writing a few prompts. Below is a list of the 10 most popular and user friendly ones. What makes art great is the personal meaning and story behind it, so we recommend that you further adjust the AI-generated work to reflect your personal style instead of sharing the output as is. Artbreeder, formerly known as Ganbreeder, is a collaborative website where you can use their machine learning technology to generate and modify images and create art. The site uses Generative Adversarial Network technology with BigGAN and StyleGAN models.
There is a publicly accessible database of images where users can “remix” images created by other users, hence introducing terms like “crossbred,” “gene,” and “child” to AI-art world. However, you can also upload new images to the “breeder.”
Note that all images generated using Artbreeder are public domain and may be used for commercial purposes.
The site generally brings about beautiful and surreal artwork which can come out as odd and weird, depending on what you’re going for. Jenni Pasanen, for instance, is one of our favorite artists who use Artbreeder to create stunning art. Her surreal and dreamy style greatly benefits from the tool.
Reflection, 2022 by Jenni Pasanen, created using ArtBreeder and Photoshop
“The element of surprise when using tools that you cannot control is always excites me; that’s why I love ArtBreeder as there’s an option to do so.”
Read more about Jenni Pasanen in 10 Digital Artists: Wonderful and surreal digital dreamlands
Midjourney is a popular AI-art generator that is self-defined as “an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.”
To start using Midjourney you need the Discord app, a free application that hosts group chats, which is highly used among web3 groups and organizations. Midjourney has an automated Discord server in which the user can write prompts to generate art.
Note that any typed prompt and generated artwork can be seen and used by other users in the server. Also note that Midjourney does not grant you the right to print, sell, or merchandise the generated images unless you are a paid member.
If you’re interested in creating photography-like images, you might want to explore making art with Stable Diffusion.
It’s a latent text-to-image diffusion model that generates photo-realistic images to any given text input. Stable Diffusion is free to use via their website, and they don’t require any personal information unlike most other softwares. They also don’t store your text or image, which is great for privacy and not-so-great if you’d like to keep a library.
Note that images created through Stable Diffusion are fully open source.
DALL·E 2 is an artificial intelligence system created by OpenAI labs. It can create art as well as realistic images based on the text input.
It works with a credit system — currently 115 credits cost $15 USD.
Unlike other softwares which allow creating images to any given input, DALL·E 2 prevents its users to generate violent, hate, or adult images. It also doesn’t generate images of real individuals or public figures, so you know those deep fake images of Pope Francis and Donald Trump weren’t created using DALL·E 2.
NightCafe Creator’s founder Angus Russell was highly dissatisfied with all the wall-art options he found online — so he decided to build an AI-art platform.
Russell wanted to create a platform where people can generate artwork that are personal and are conversation-starters. The studio allows you to add a text prompt and tweak your settings for style before creating the AI-generated artwork.
NightCafe uses the text-to-image art generation method known as VQGAN+CLIP.
Starryai is one of the more user-friendly AI art generator apps. You simply enter a text prompt and their AI transforms your words into art in the style of your choice.
It uses three AI models to generate art; the first model is called Altair, which produces dream-like or abstract images; the second is called Orion, and it uses Clip Guided Diffusion to produce more cohesive images; the third model, Argo, is used for artistic and product renders.
The software also allows you to turn your art into an NFT within the app.
In 2015, Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev discovered that he can reverse-engineer the software that’s designed to detect faces and other patterns in images and train it to create images based on input. That’s how DeepDream was born.
The program can create complex AI images using neural networks, which is a type of machine learning process where the computer is trained to process data just like humans do.
DeepDream, as the name suggests, brings about dreamlike — or even psychedelic — images.
Another app where you enter a prompt, pick an art style and watch your idea become an AI-powered painting is Dream by WOMBO. You can turn text into any image or photo you want, and the app allows you to further edit the creations by adding more text prompts.
The app is free to download and they offer subscriptions for $9.99 per month or $89.99 for one year.
ml5.js is an open source coding library developed and maintained by NYU's Interactive Telecommunications/Interactive Media Arts program. The software is powered by artists, designers, students, technologists, and developers from all over the world.
The library provides access to pre-trained machine learning algorithms and models with Javascript codes. The user gets access to “pre-trained models for detecting human poses, generating text, styling an image with another, composing music, pitch detection, and common English language word relationships, and much more.”
This may be more difficult to use in comparison to above-mentioned simple text-to-image softwares, but it’s a great tool for those who are interested in being more engaged in machine learning and computing.
Finally, Canvas is NVIDIA Research’s AI model that allows the user to create photorealistic images from simple elements. The user can combine sketches with short texts to design their own landscapes.
The selling point of NVIDIA Canvas is that the user can paint by material instead of color — like clouds or snow. You can customize the image to depict mountains or a tropical wonderland. It’s a brilliant tool for creating landscapes.
NVIDIA Canvas generates realistic landscapes from simple sketches.
Feeling inspired? Share your AI-generated artwork and make sure to tag us to be featured!
We share works by digital artists as well as digital arts exhibitions, events, and open calls daily on Instagram — follow us for more and subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss new blog posts.
