Top 11 Text to Image AI Generators/Artwork Tools

In 2022, AI-powered tools that can do text-to-image or text-to-art are sparking everyone's imaginations. These AI image generators can achieve with text input what a visual editor or graphic designer can require for several hours or days. You simply input a text description of the image you would like to see. People call this text described as a "text prompt". There is even a whole new role or career emerging because of AI image generator tools. "Prompt engineering" is all about figuring out what kinds of descriptions to include in a text prompt to get awesome art or image outputs. It entails describing many things like the subjects, their actions, and the scene. It can also include the photo or painting genre or any famous artist whose style you want the image to have.

In this article, we will look at the best AI art generators or AI text-to-image tools that you can utilize to create amazing visual content. While at their basic, all AI generator software requires you to provide a text prompt, the image quality, features, and pricing can vary greatly. We include AI text-to-art tools that are free, freemium/free trial, and paid tools. You will surely have a roller-coaster ride and get hooked by generating funny, astonishing, and even award-winning images and art pieces using these AI image generators.

1. DALL·E 2

• OpenAI's Dalle 2 has defined this new category of AI-powered image generator tools.
• Earlier, it was in closed beta and then had a beta signup waitlist. But now you can simply register and log in to start using Dalle 2. They may ask you to verify your phone number.
• As a welcome gift, you will receive 50 credits that expire after 30 days if you don't use them. So make sure to make the most of them! Every month henceforth, you will receive 15 free credits.
• You can buy more Dalle credits, at a rate of $15 for every 115 credits.

Using Dalle2

• You can enter a text prompt, as simple as a single word, like "panda". Or you can try your hand at prompt engineering, and input a very detailed description of what you want to see.
• If you don't have any ideas, just click the "Surprise me" button and Dalle2 will autogenerate a text prompt.
• But Dalle2 does not limit you to text prompts! You can even give it image inputs, by uploading images you have. Or you can even ask it to make variations on the images that it generated in its previous prompts. Dalle will understand the content and style of the input image, and give you 4 new original images.
• Dalle2 also has inpainting and outpainting "edit tools". You can use inpainting to erase or replace certain sections of an image. This is done using the "Eraser" tool. With outpainting, you can expand an image by using the "generation frame" tool. People have made large artworks and collages using the outpainting technique.

Dalle2 Limitations

• Once your free credits are over, which can happen very quickly, you have to pay and buy credits.
• Dalle2 crops uploaded images and also generates new images in a 1024 x 1024 square frame. It is possible using outpainting to overcome this and generate landscape or portrait images in different dimensions.
• To make outpainting cheaper (require fewer credits for expanding an image), you have to use an external image editor to shrink the original image and make the surrounding area transparent.

2. Midjourney

• Midjourney requires you to use Discord which is a popular group chatting or messaging tool.
• You get 25 free trial images.
• To generate image, you give your text prompt to the midjourney discord bot. You must type /imagine and then your description. You can use the /help command to see more commands and info.
• Like Dalle2, Midjourney gives you 4 output images per text prompt. You can further edit these images, by asking it to generate Variations or to upscale the image resolution. You do this by clicking on the V1 to V4 buttons for variations, or U1 to U4 buttons for upscaling.
• Once you generate your free 25 images, you must buy Midjourney subscription. Do this using the /subscribe command to get your personal subscription link. You can buy $10/month Basic membership with 200 image credits per month. Or the Standard membership for $30 with unlimited personal-use credits.
• People find Midjourney great for creating fantasy and nature scenery images, in different styles like photorealistic and graphic paintings. It is a great tool for artistically minded people with a good imagination and an eye for visual design.

3. Stable Diffusion / DreamStudio

• Stable Diffusion is an open-source, free alternative to Dalle2 and Midjourney. It was first released as a Github repository and people made Google Colab notebooks to make its usage accessible. You can use these for free.
• However now you can also use Stable Diffusion in an even more convenient web interface. It called Dream Studio and it is a freemium service.
• You must sign up and login to use Dream Studio. You get 200 free generations to begin with. Later on, you can buy 1000 image generation credits for just $10. So it is much cheaper than Dalle2 and Midjourney.
• Dream Studio also offers many input parameters to customize. You can use these to finetune the performance of Stable Diffusion algorithm. However, note that this can result in more image credits being used up. It depends on the computing resources being used.
• Dream Studio offers a quick guide on prompt engineering, so if you are a newbie you can understand what it is all about.

4. Jasper Art AI Image Generator

• Jasper.ai is a top-ranking AI content generation tool. They are now offering Jasper Art as a paid AI image generator service included with their standard membership.
• You cannot use Jasper Art for free. Its introductory promotional price is $20/month with unlimited images. However, later on, they can increase the pricing plans and limit the outputs possible.
• But it can be worth the price as they generate high-quality images and have lots of helpful input parameters. Thanks to them, you don't have to be an expert at prompt engineering. Just select different styles, mediums, keywords, and moods from dropdown menus.
• In addition to these tools, they also have helpful guides and an active community. So you can get plenty of tips and inspiration for generating AI artworks and visual content for your blog, videos and marketing copy.

5. Hypotenuse AI Image Generator and Art Maker

• Similar to Jasper, Hypotenuse AI is another paid service for AI content generation. With Hypotenuse AI, you can create original written content, do fact checking as well as summarise and rephrase existing content. Now they also have an AI image generator tool included in their suite of AI tools.
• With a Starter pack for $24/month, you get 200 AI image generation credits (along with other AI content generation services). If you need more, go for their Growth pack for $49/month offering unlimited AI image generation.
• Their free trial starts with 15 credits. But you can earn more free credits by sharing this tool with your friends by email or social media.
• To simplify prompt engineering, Hypotenuse offers a step-by-step guide and autogeneration of prompts. It also has optional input parameters like Type, Aesthetic, Mood & Lighting, Arist or Style and Modifers with dropdown choices.
• Hypotenuse AI also offers you to choose image dimensions between square, landscape or portrait.

6. Meta AI's Make a Video

• Till now, you have seen many AI text-to-image generators. They all create still images. But what if you could create text-to-animated GIFs from text prompts?
• This is what Meta AI (formerly Facebook AI) is offering with Make-A-Video. Note that they generate AI art in Dalle2-like square assets, but they are animated!
• While they are calling it "text-to-video", it is more like text-to-animated images. It is great to see your imagined text prompts coming to life and moving.
• Meta AI's Make-a-Video is still in research and testing mode. You can read their research paper and browse through their sample gallery.
• More information about free access and pricing plans for Make-A-Video will be available in the future.

How to get access to Meta AI's Make-a-Video?

• Are you interested in trying Meta AI's text-to-video AI animated image generator?
• To get access to Make-a-Video, you must go to their official website and fill the Google form for beta access.

7. Google Imagen

• Google Imagen offers more accurate and clearer AI-generated images compared to OpenAI's Dalle2.
• However, it is still not available for public usage.
• You can read their research paper and browse through the sample gallery.

8. Wombo Dream

• Dream by Wombo is a free web-based AI art generation tool. They also have Android and iOS mobile apps.
• It is optimized to create painting-style artworks from text prompts.
• You can also upload an input image to let it copy its style.
• Wombo Dream has about 40 art styles to choose from. These include Isometric, Polygon, Paint, Comic, Retro-futurism, Line Art, Meme and Steampunk.
• You get the output artwork in the form of "cards" for free.
• Further monetization is possible. You can connect your crypto wallet with Wombo and mint your artwork into NFTs. You will need to pay the gas fees and royalty for this.
• Or you can get your artwork printed and framed professionally so you can put it up in your office or home.

9. Craiyon (Dalle Mini)

• This is the free alternative to Dalle that went viral. It was earlier known as Dalle Mini, but now they have renamed it to Craiyon.
• The image quality is lower than other alternatives we have seen till now. It also generates weird faces. But it offers 9 image outputs for every prompt.
• It is a fun free tool to create low-resolution reference images from text prompts. It can take upto 2 minutes to generate images from a text prompt.
• Prompt engineering has evolved through the online community playing with Dalle mini. When Dalle2 was still in limited access, this was all they could play with easily.
• The online community on Twitter and Reddit has been sharing their experiments with the text prompts on Dalle Mini. Things like what terms or modifiers got them better image quality, and the screenshots of their outputs etc.

10. DeepAI Text to Image

• DeepAI offers a free web interface to generate images from text, to let you try it.
• You may experience temporary pauses in this service if you are logged out. You can sign up and login to use it.
• However, their main offering is an API service that costs $2 per 1000 API calls.
• Developers can thus use DeepAI's text-to-image API for building their own AI image generator apps.

11. Nightcafe

• Nightcafe is an excellent alternative to Midjourney for creating high-quality artwork.
• You get 10 free credits as welcome gift, as well as 5 free credits. But you must check your inbox on their site and click a button to "claim" these daily free credits.
• Community-generated artwork is available for browsing. You can go through the top-rated artwork.
• For any artwork, you can see the original text prompt used under "Creation settings". So it is a great place to improve your prompt engineering skills by learning from how others generated their excellent AI images.
• Nightcafe Pro consists of 4 monthly subscription plans. For $10, $20, $50 and $80 per month, you get 100, 250, 700 and 1500 credits respectively.

Final Words

AI Image generators are here to stay. As more and more tools with high-quality image creation capabilities enter the market, the prices are likely to drop. This will result in a flood of amazing artwork and raise the demand for prompt engineers. The masterpiece creator artists who were skilled at using drawing tools became successful and famous.

Now, with AI text-to-image tools at your service, you have a genie who grants your wishes. It is the era of prompt engineers who can imagine interesting concepts and who also understand how to describe them in words. Then, through trial and error, and by curating the best outputs, they can keep improving the quality of generative artworks and create masterpieces.

Let us know in the comments which of the above text-to-art generators do you like the best? And are there any other excellent AI artwork makers that we can include to our list?