AI art generators have moved from novelty to niche to even a commodity in just months, with numerous services promising the ability to create generative AI art instantly using natural-language text prompts. The very best AI art services offer superb imagery and superior tools, either for free or for a low price.
Why use AI art? Many of us can appreciate a great painting, photograph, or drawing without having the ability to create it ourselves. We may also be able to describe what we want to see, and that’s where AI art comes in. Instead of searching for a piece of art that matches that description, the service actually generates it, matching what it knows of the scenes depicted in its image database and comparing them to the scene and style you specify.
All that complexity, however, demands intensive computing resources. AI art services tend to handle this in two ways: either limiting the generated images (the number of images or their resolution) or charging you “credits” or actual money to enable further subscriptions. We factor that in.
Finally, we can’t ignore the legal and moral implications of AI art. Generative AI art was trained on a vast number of images—some public, some possibly private—and the services use that as a “seed” for the images they produce. Not all AI services are transparent about the source of their images. Companies like Getty Images feel that this is illegal and have filed suit. The actual originality of AI art is in dispute, however, and AI proponents note that even human artists are typically trained or influenced by their exposure to existing art, whether public or private. Just know that you probably won’t “own” a piece of AI art without providing some evidence that you yourself have altered it to make it an original work.
Confused? We’ll talk more about how to get started with AI art and some of the specifics of AI art terminology you might like to know (inpainting, for example) at the end of this story.
THE BEST AI ART GENERATORS
Midjourney
Cost: Free trial (on hold) /$10/$30/$60 per month
25 prompts for the free trial, then it
