We Tested Dall-E, Midjourney, Imagine With Meta, and Playground to find our favorite.
There are a lot of AI image generators on the market, and it’s hard to know which ones are great and which ones can be skipped. We put some leading AI image-generating models to the test and found that there are huge differences.
Gizmodo tested Midjourney, OpenAI’s Dall-E, Imagine with Meta AI, and Playground AI. It’s important to note these come at different price points, though each one has free trials. For access to Dall-E, you need to have ChatGPT Plus which costs $20 a month. For unlimited access to Midjourney you need to pay $10 monthly, and unlimited for Playground AI will be $15 per month. Imagine with Meta AI is the only completely free version, but you will soon see why.
I’m ranking each model in every slide based on creativity, punctuality in capturing every part of the prompt, and ability to replicate the tone of what I’m asking for. This slideshow may have used enough energy to charge 40 smartphones to make, according to research from Hugging Face, but now you don’t have to waste that power testing for yourself.
Prompt: Create an image of a robot weatherman frantically telling viewers about an incoming winter storm.
Ranking (first to last): Dall-E, Meta, Midjourney, Playground
Analysis: Starting off with an easy one, the clear winner here is OpenAI’s Dall-E. We got a photorealistic robot delivering a snowy weather forecast. I found that Dall-E often created the image I was imagining in my brain. Playground AI’s robot seems to miss the tone and doesn’t seem to be much of a weatherman. Midjourney’s is good, definitely frantic, but not what I was looking for. Meta AI is significantly less realistic than the others, but I was satisfied with the tone, details, and overall story of its creation.
Prompt: Make me an image of a televised presidential debate between a reality TV star and an old man, with an audience full of reporters and cheering fans.
Ranking: Midjourney, Dall-E, Playground AI, Meta
Analysis: All of these actually missed the mark. Dall-E gave us “Oldbama” and “Old Trump,” which I suppose is fairly close. Meta gave us a terrifying mix of Joe Biden and Donald Trump that I can’t unsee. Midjourney didn’t give me quite what I was looking for, but won points for creativity.
Prompt: Create an image of a whimsical underwater city, with colorful coral buildings, schools of tropical fish swimming between structures, and a group of merpeople gathering in a central, glowing plaza.
