Last year I wrote an article about the best free AI image generators in 2023. Now it’s time to introduce some very good AI art generators of this year.
There are a lot of changes, new functions in these free AI image generators. I can mention some new and powerful AI image tools which are released this year.
There are some changes, for example OpenAI enabled to use DALL-E 3 free, but with limitations.
Playground AI made a huge update in 2024: v3 beta is available.
Black Fores Labs introduced Flux image generator.
Midjourney is unfortunately not free due to the high demand and popularity, you must pay for the subscription.
DALL-E 3
OpenAI was among the first to create an AI image generation tool. The free version of DALL-E 3 became available a few weeks ago in ChatGPT. You can learn from this article how to create images with different aspect ratios.
There is an another way to generate images with DALL-E 3 for free: it is embedded into Microsoft Copilot as well.
General information:
- You can create 2 images per day with ChatGPT
Benefits of the free version:
- easy to use
- ChatGPT can enhace your prompt to make it more detailed and accurate
Limitations of the free version:
- changing the parameters is not easy
Playground AI
Playground AI made a huge update in this year. They released v3 beta and implemented the so called Design function.
If you navigate to the website you can first select a project type (for example Logo, Seamless Patterns or Social Media Post) and after that you can choose from a large list of templates. Many templates are free, but some are available only with Pro subscription.
If you selected the template, than you can change the image and change the style.
I’m plan to write an article about this brand new design tool, so check back later.
You can generate images with the original create tool of course.
General features:
- User gallery (Community Feed)
- Possibility to remix generated images by others
- Keyword search
- Canvas editor
- Designer
- Ability to change image aspect ratio
- Various filters
Limitations of the free version:
- 10 images in 24 hours
- 30 prompt expansions / month
- 5 creative upscales / month
- 30 subtle upscale / month
- Maximum resolution of generated images: 1024 x 1024 pixels in case of 1:1 ratio
- Slower image generation, the Pro
- Other image quality restrictions
- Not all design templates are available for free
Leonardo Ai
Leonardo Ai is even better then in 2023. In this year some new innovative features was added to this tool, like the Phoenix preset. In the early days of computer generated images it was a big problem to render text on the image, but Leonardo Ai solved this problem with Phoenix.
General features:
- User gallery (Recent Creations)
- Possibility to remix generated images by other users
- Canvas editor
- Realtime Canvas (originally called live canvas, see my article and youtube video)
This application has additional extra features such as:
- texture generation for 3D models
- video generation
Limitations of the free version:
- 150 fast tokens, resets once per day
- no private generations
- Images can be up to 1024×1024 pixels (in case of square ratio)
Flux
There is a new AI art generator tool on the market created by Black Forest Labs. The rumor is that this is a revolutionary AI image generator because it can create photorealistic images.
I heard that the people worked on Stable Diffusion made Flux as well.
If you scroll down on the Flux website then you can see that many images seems to be photorealistic in thumbnail size and looks even as a real photo if you enlarge it. So Flux is very convicing, I will try it soon.
Interesting is that it’s open source, so everyone can download it for free and experiment with it.
Flux has three different versions:
- pro – for professionals – this is unfortunately not free
- dev – still very quality model, but only for non-commercial usage
- schnell – the fastest model, for personal use, you can install and run it on your own computer and generate images in a couple of seconds depending on your computer speed
Summary
The free AI image generators mentioned above providing a good possibility to try AI-based image generation. If you’re on a limited budget or just curious to see what these apps can do, it’s worth trying at least one of them out. I personally recommend Playground AI and Leonardo Ai because of the wide variety of customisation possibilities even in the free version.
I would like to see your creations! Feel free to try the apps above and share your results!
