Best Apps For Stunning AI Art (Midjourney Alternatives)
Summary
TLDRThe video provides a comprehensive ranking of popular AI art generators, with Midjourney V5 rated as the top choice due to its superior aesthetic quality and handling of human features. Alternatives like DALL-E 2, NightCafe, and Leonardo.ai are discussed for their unique strengths and free usage options. The video also covers other tools like Stability AI, Canva, and Runway, highlighting their specific use cases. The speaker explains how to make money with AI-generated art through platforms like Wirestock, and encourages participation in creative AI art events hosted on Discord.
Takeaways
- 🎨 Midjourney V5 is considered the best AI art generator, especially for photorealistic images, with significant improvements in generating human features like hands, teeth, and faces.
- 💰 Midjourney is now a paid service, and the free trial has been removed, though sometimes it is briefly re-enabled.
- 🖼️ DALL-E 2 by OpenAI is an A-tier AI art generator, particularly strong with abstract and cartoonish art, but not as effective at generating realistic human characters.
- 🧑🎨 NightCafe is user-friendly and offers good quality AI art, but struggles with generating human figures, especially complex body postures like ballerinas.
- 🎮 Leonardo.ai is a highly recommended free-ish AI art generator, especially good for generating humans, with access to multiple models and the ability to fine-tune them.
- 💻 Wirestock allows creators to sell AI-generated art on major stock marketplaces like Adobe Stock, Pond5, and DepositPhotos, taking an 85% cut for creators.
- 📈 Beginners can use platforms like Dreamline Art and Deep Dream Generator, which offer artsy and user-friendly options but may not match the quality of higher-tier services like Midjourney.
- 💡 Stability AI’s Dream Studio allows fun features like auto-expanding images, but like most Stable Diffusion models, struggles with human characters.
- 📷 Canva’s AI image generator, despite being convenient, produces poor results when generating human images, earning it a C-tier rank.
- 🎥 Runway is notable for its text-to-video features, but its text-to-image results are below average, particularly with generating human characters.
Q & A
What makes Midjourney V5.1 the top AI art generator according to the script?
-Midjourney V5.1 is considered the best due to its ability to generate highly aesthetic, photorealistic images, particularly when it comes to human anatomy, faces, hands, and other challenging details. It stands out among competitors for its superior quality.
Why did Midjourney remove its free trial, and how does this affect users?
-Midjourney removed its free trial, which previously allowed users to generate 25 images for free. This change forces new users to pay for the service. Occasionally, the free trial is re-enabled temporarily, but it is typically a paid service.
What differentiates Dall-e-2 from other AI art generators?
-Dall-e-2, created by OpenAI, uses a custom model rather than stable diffusion, which is open source. This unique model gives Dall-e-2 its own capabilities, particularly excelling at cartoonish and abstract images, but it struggles with generating photorealistic humans.
How does Night Cafe rank in terms of user experience and image quality?
-Night Cafe is praised for being very user-friendly, with presets, competitions, and examples to inspire users. While it excels at generating certain types of images, it struggles with photorealistic humans, especially in complex compositions like body anatomy.
What are the strengths of Leonardo.ai, and how can users access it?
-Leonardo.ai offers 150 free credits daily and excels in generating human-like images. It allows users to fine-tune models and has a wide selection of styles, including a diffusion model with dark and aesthetic qualities. Users need to sign up for early access, which takes 3-5 days.
Why is Stable Diffusion often criticized for generating human images?
-Stable Diffusion, which underpins many AI art generators, tends to struggle with rendering realistic human anatomy, especially in complex poses or faces. This often leads to distorted or unusable images when trying to depict people.
What features make Wirestock an attractive option for selling AI-generated art?
-Wirestock simplifies the process of selling AI-generated art by uploading images to multiple stock marketplaces simultaneously, like Adobe, Pond5, and DepositPhotos. Creators get an 85% cut of sales, and Wirestock is developing an AI upscaler to help artists meet resolution requirements.
Why does the video place Canva's image generator in the C tier?
-Canva's image generator is based on Stable Diffusion, which struggles with human images. However, it's ranked in the C tier due to its convenience, being integrated into Canva's design tools, which makes it useful for simple tasks.
What does the script suggest about Dream Studio by Stability AI?
-Dream Studio, created by Stability AI (the company behind Stable Diffusion), offers fun features like auto-expanding images. However, the script suggests that while it can be enjoyable for enthusiasts, it lacks the quality found in top-tier generators like Midjourney.
What are the downsides of lower-tier AI art generators like Crayon or Lensa AI?
-Lower-tier generators like Crayon (based on Dall-e Mini) and Lensa AI are limited in quality. Crayon delivers simplistic and often underwhelming images, while Lensa AI, which became viral for its photo remixes, is inferior to Midjourney in terms of quality and flexibility.
Outlines
🎨 The Rise of AI Art Generators and Midjourney's Dominance
AI art generators have surged in popularity due to their utility and entertainment value, but not all tools are created equal. The best current option is Midjourney V5, which excels at generating aesthetic and photorealistic images, particularly with human hands, faces, and bodies. However, Midjourney has recently removed its free trial, which may limit its accessibility. This paragraph introduces the concept of AI art generators, the tier list ranking system, and establishes Midjourney's dominance in the field.
💰 Midjourney’s Cost and Free Alternatives: Dall-e-2, Night Cafe, and Leonardo.ai
Midjourney, while the best, is no longer free, prompting many users to look for alternatives. Three notable free options in the A-tier are Dall-e-2 by OpenAI, Night Cafe, and Leonardo.ai. Dall-e-2 is based on a custom model different from the widely used Stable Diffusion. It's great for abstract and cartoonish images but struggles with human realism. Night Cafe, known for its user-friendliness and social features, is easy to use but has issues generating realistic humans. Leonardo.ai, although marketed for game asset generation, offers strong results, especially for human images, thanks to its customizable models.
🖼️ Leonardo.ai and Making Money with AI Art
Leonardo.ai stands out due to its customizable models and daily free credits. It produces good results, especially for human figures, and allows users to fine-tune models with their own data, making it versatile for many types of art. Additionally, this section introduces Wirestock, a platform that allows creators to sell their AI-generated art on multiple marketplaces. Wirestock simplifies the process of selling digital art, offering up to 85% of the profits, and will soon introduce its own AI upscaling tool to ensure image quality meets marketplace standards.
🧑🎨 B-Tier AI Generators and Niche Use Cases
The B-tier includes AI art tools that are useful for specific cases but lack the versatility of higher-ranked tools. Dreamlike Art offers a user-friendly interface for beginners, while Deep Dream Generator produces artistic results but has a high subscription fee. Stability AI, which developed the widely-used Stable Diffusion model, provides Dream Studio, a free platform for experimenting with auto-expanding images. These apps are fun to use and great for enthusiasts, but for premium performance, Midjourney and Leonardo remain superior.
📉 C-Tier and Lower AI Tools: Usability Issues and Drawbacks
C-tier tools like Canva’s AI generator and Crayon offer convenience but fall short in performance, particularly with human figures. Canva integrates Stable Diffusion but is mainly useful within the context of its design suite. Below the C-tier, apps like Lensai and Jasper are either outdated or underperform, especially compared to free alternatives in higher tiers. These apps may appeal to niche users, but their value is limited in comparison to top-tier tools.
🎉 Fun with AI Art Competitions and Final Thoughts
The video closes with an invitation to join the creator's Discord server for AI art remix competitions, showcasing the creative possibilities of AI art generation. Examples of winning entries, including a SpongeBob remix, are highlighted. The conclusion also encourages viewers to leave feedback on the AI art tool rankings, which will be regularly updated as tools evolve. The final thought emphasizes Midjourney as the most reliable paid tool, with Leonardo as the most effective free alternative.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡AI Art Generators
💡Midjourney
💡DALL-E 2
💡Stable Diffusion
💡Leonardo.ai
💡Night Cafe
💡Tier List
💡Human Figure Generation
💡Wirestock
💡Custom Models
💡Upscaling
Highlights
AI art generators have become increasingly popular and offer useful, fun tools for generating images.
Midjourney is widely regarded as the best AI art generator due to its aesthetic quality, ability to handle human anatomy, and photorealism.
Midjourney no longer offers a free trial, making it a paid service.
Dall-e-2 by OpenAI is another popular AI art generator known for its high quality, particularly with abstract and cartoonish images, but struggles with human figures.
Night Cafe is highlighted for its ease of use, offering daily challenges and a social feature that makes the platform user-friendly.
Night Cafe and Stable Diffusion models struggle with generating realistic human images, often producing unsatisfactory results.
Leonardo.ai is noted for being free-ish, offering 150 credits a day, and provides good results for human images by allowing users to pick from various models.
Leonardo.ai also allows users to fine-tune their own models, making it a versatile platform for creators.
Wirestock, a platform for selling AI-generated art, offers a simple way to distribute images to major stock marketplaces.
Wirestock's AI upscaler will soon make it easier to upload high-resolution AI art, integrated with Discord for seamless image sharing.
The video highlights lesser-known AI art generators like Dreamline Art and Deep Dream Generator, which are easy for beginners to use.
Stability AI’s Dream Studio is fun to use for features like auto-expanding images but isn't as powerful as Midjourney.
Runway is noted for its exciting work in text-to-video, although its text-to-image capabilities are average.
Crayon is based on the Dall-e Mini model and generates lightweight, less detailed images.
A Discord community hosts AI art remix contests, fostering a space for creators to share and compete in AI art generation.
Transcripts
AI Art generators have been all over the Internet lately and for good reason. They
can be really useful and they're actually a lot of fun. But not all of them are created equal
and this can make it really hard especially now that Midjourney removed their free trial.
So if you ever wondered what other alternatives are actually out there and which ones of those
are actually useful, you're in the right place because now I'm going to show you
a ranking of my favorite AI art generators and a bunch of examples to help you decide.
So let's get started from the top by looking at the very best ones first. And as you might
already know, the best one right now is Midjourney V5 and now 5.1 is even better so that's why it's
S tier. And if you're not familiar with these tier lists, it's very simple. This is similar
to grading with school with S tier being just perfect. So down here F is the worst and S tier
is the best. And the reason Midjourney is the best is because it's very aesthetic and they manage to
fix the issue with human hands. They mostly fix teeth, bodies, and human faces and they're also
the best at generating photorealistic images. And I don't think this is a large discussion,
most people that use AI art extensively would agree that Midjourney is King right now.
Alright, so Midjourney is best but what's the problem? Well, it's quite simple. They charge
for their services and they now remove their free trial so you don't get 25 images for free
anymore as it did over the course of the last few months. If you follow the server closely,
sometimes they re-enable it for a few days but usually, it's going to be paid.
And that brings us to our next tier here because most of these underneath are actually free to use.
And in our A tier category here we have Dali 2 by OpenAI, we have Night Cafe Art Studio, and we
have leonardo.ai. And all three of these are very different so let's talk through them one by one.
So Dall-e-2 is a model created by OpenAI and it's particularly interesting because
Dall-e-2 is actually based upon a custom model. Most of these other ones are based upon stable
diffusion which is the most popular AI image generator that is fully open source so anybody
can build on it for free. Dali and now Dall-e-2 is different because they build their model. And
if you didn't know also Midjourney is different in that way and that's why they're better. Any
further details are not known to the public but all their status they have their own model
now which seems to be better than all the stuff out there and that's why they're doing so well.
So how do you use this? Well, you're gonna need to open an AI account just like you do with
ChatGPT and then you can go to labs.openai.com and start generating images with Dall-e-2. And
there was a waitlist for this first but around the end of 2022 they just put it out to the
public and everybody can use it. So you can upload images, you can take inspiration here,
or you can just use the text image features in this text box and that is pretty much Dali.
And the quality here is very high especially when it comes to cartoonish or abstract items. But I do
have to say this when it comes to generating human characters like anything that involves
humans within the picture which is actually one of the most common motifs that you will want to
generate in a lot of the cases, Dali 2 is not great. And what we did is we generate the first
two example prompts from our resource here. So look, this right here, the results you would get
with Midjourney and here is what you get with Dali 2. It's already no detail in the phase and
if you look at the ballerina this is just very different. So if you're looking for the stylized
look within humans it's fine but if you're looking for photorealistic images of humans,
none of the models presented here are as good as Midjourney right now. That's just a fact.
But with that being said, let's move on and we'll keep these two examples in mind as we re-run them
for all of these image generators. Okay, so next one on the list is Night Cafe and this
one is actually super easy to use and yields very good results. All you need to do is go to
nightcafe.studio and again all the links will be in the description below and all you need to do
is with Night Cafe is just create an account and you can start generating. And even these
daily challenges are kind of fun to participate in and as you can see these results are really good.
So while crafting this tier list we also considered user friendliness and
Night Cafe is very user-friendly because it offers some of these presets, competitions,
and a lot of quality examples for you to get inspired. And what intrigues me personally
about this is that they have this social feature plus the quality of this image in
particular is just excellent. This is a 10 out of 10 when it comes to generating this
type of image and that's what I love here. It might not be able to do everything but
the things that it can do are excellent and that's why I would recommend it.
And for Night Cafe, if we do our little comparison here, it's just gonna be absolute catastrophe for
the app because it's based upon stable diffusion and stable diffusion by default is terrible at
humans. It will create these monstrosities that I will show you now so just be prepared. So here's
what it did for the image of the homeless woman. As you can see the environment is
okay and actually quite good but when it comes to showing the people it's absolutely unusable. It's
at least smart enough to cover up that fact in some of these other images. And when it
comes to ballerina that is kind of the ultimate test because you have to get the anatomy right,
you'd have to get the face right and usually the body postures are quite extreme but they
need to make sense otherwise us humans will pick up on the fact that it's not right. So now
have a look at the atrocity that it produced. Well, there's like 50 things to critique here
so we'll just close it off and now you know that this is not meant to be used for humans.
Okay, let's move on to the next one. So the next one is leonardo.ai. And Leonardo is interesting
because it's free-ish currently. It comes with 150 credits a day if you get an account and in
order for you to get an account, you need to sign up to Early Access with your email. From
what I've heard usually takes three to five days for you to get accepted and then you
can start using your free accounts every day. And don't get thrown off by the fact that they
market this to be a game asset generator. This is excellent for so many other use cases too.
So again, they're really marketing this towards game designers but if you look at the examples
of the homeless woman and the ballerina you will find that Leonardo yields some of the
best results here. And the reason for that is that once you're inside the app, you get to
pick from various models and some of them are actually quite good with humans. Look at this,
this is not perfect but it's quite good and I would say the homeless woman is actually quite
usable. So Leonardo is really great and what you'll see once you're inside is that you get
all these various models to pick from. So Leonardo Diffusion is a fine-tuned model of table diffusion
that is dark and very aesthetic in my opinion. I really like this one and with this deliberate
model, you will actually be able to create decent humans and there are many more in here.
One more thing that I should point out is that it actually allows you to fine-tune
your own models. So I could actually take one of these models and train it further
with my own data which is absolutely amazing and it's so user-friendly on here. Honestly,
this is shaping up to be one of the best AI art platforms as their mission is trying to
be the Photoshop of AI art. So I strongly recommend you check this one out and again
and get a bunch of these credits which is more than enough to get you started.
And now I want to take a moment to tell you about a possibility that you could use to
make some extra money on the side with your AI art generations and that is for today's
sponsor wire stock. It's the easiest way to sell your AI-generated art with over 230,000
creators and more than 9 million media items. Wire stock makes it a breeze to
upload and sell content on the world's largest stock marketplaces. And as we are discussing
AI-generated images today it's important to mention that not all of these platforms
except AI generated alright but with wire stock, you get to upload to Adobe Photo
pond5 and deposit photos simultaneously. All of those three are good to go and if
you sell images on there you're gonna get an 85% cut. Additionally, creators get individual
portfolios for free where they can sell content directly, create collections and even sell prints.
But it should be noted that you need to upscale your images before you upload them to wire stock
otherwise they won't be accepted. And right now there's many tools to do that but very soon there
will be releasing their very own AI upscaler that will help you upload to their platform.
That's going to make it super easy to enhance and upscale your AI art so it has the necessary
resolution for all of these sites to accept it and guess what they're going to be integrating
that with Discord which will allow you to directly send images from Discord to wire stock and they
will distribute it to the part-time marketplaces making everything as seamless as it could be.
So here's the deal with wire stock, you get direct access to selling on the world's largest
marketplaces without the hassle of separate signups, extensive forms or payment on multiple
sites and all that for a 15% fee. As someone who has been uploading and selling stock photos and
videos for seven years let me tell you that's a good deal especially when generating some of these
images takes seconds and then distributing them amongst the platforms will take beginners hours.
So if you're an AI artist or just looking to sell your creative work online give wire stock a try.
Click the link in the description to try it out for free and if you
decide to upgrade make sure to use my code advantage20 for a discount
at checkout. And now let's get back to exploring the best AI image generators.
The next category, the B tier, are ones that I have bookmarked but I only come back to
them for specific use cases. So for example, dreamline art is a very beginner-friendly way
to get started with all of this and it gets you up and running with stable diffusion like
no other app extremely beginner friendly and I would strongly recommend this one.
Deep Dream Generator on the other hand is a fantastic app, with very artsy results,
but their plans start at 19 a month and for that, I would just go straight to mid-journey.
And then in this tier I also put Stability AI which is actually the company that brought out
the stable diffusion model that I talked about so much and that most of these are
actually built upon and they have their very own app called Dream Studio which
you can access for free and this allows you to do some fun stuff like auto expand images
and it's quite good at that and just fun to play with. So if you're an AI art enthusiast
I would recommend you play with all seven of these and see what they're good at,
what those different models are capable of and where the weaknesses are. And if you're gonna
pay for one I would make that Midjourney with the most useful free one being Leonardo right now.
And that brings me to the last category. So here we enter hmm that's kind of interesting territory
but honestly I don't really return to many of these because they have major weaknesses and in
the categories above you will usually find better results that are also all free. So for example,
the Canva image generator yet again is based upon stable diffusion and will get you results like
this or this when it comes to humans so absolutely unusable but it is inside of Canva and we actually
use Canva to design some of our Instagram posts and there it's just super useful to have it right
there. So for the sake of convenience and ease of use, it actually got C tier although it's
really not that great. So the same thing would go for most of these, they're either easy to
use or integrated into something interesting and this is the category where I would say if you're
interested in this stuff check all of them out because they could introduce one upgrade and all
of a sudden they would be great but right now they're kind of in this weird in-between spot.
One more honorable mention should go to Runway. They're doing some fascinating
stuff in text to video but their text image is just average at best. And I'll give them this,
they actually generated the worst ballerina out of all the examples. Have a look at this one, oh God,
I'm sorry this is gonna haunt your dreams now. And then we also have
Crayon which is based upon the Dali Mini model which is a lightweight
model of Dali that we talked about above and this generates results like this.
And look below this, we enter the territory of the apps that tried but honestly are not very
useful. I mean okay, text to Pokemon might have some niche use cases but otherwise all of these
I would rather avoid. I mean you might recall Lanzai that was the viral app where everybody
created AI variations of their own photos but it cost money and it does nothing but generate
images and Midjourney right now can remix your photos way better than Lensai was ever able to.
And also the Jasper image generator costs money and it's not even as good as the free stuff in A
and B tier so that's why it's down here. It's not horrendous but I don't see a reason to use it.
And then the category down here are just the ones that you should stay away from. It's
not even worth your time exploring them. But hey look, I might have missed something here
so leave a comment below if you disagree with one of these rankings but make sure to leave a
reason and then over time we can update this tier list to reflect the current reality including all
of your guys' feedback to make this resource as good as possible. As we'll make this amongst many
other maternal resources available for free on our website from here on out so you'll find a link to
that below. You can check it regularly and we'll be updating the rankings as these apps evolve.
And lastly, I would like to bring your attention to the events that we started running inside of
our Discord server. It's completely free, the events are free, they're just there for you
to have fun and we actually just ran our AI art remix contest to remix various images. So with 50
participants and I gave them SpongeBob and they had five minutes to generate a remix and look,
this is what the winner of this round, Karate, came up with. Isn't that just incredible? So
these are some of the possibilities here and right here you can see the four winners. So this one was
Success Kit before this was Nyan Cat and this was the Chat GPT logo. So if you're interested
in participating in the next one we're holding it on May 20th and there's gonna be regular contests
after that. So feel free to join us, generate some AI art and learn while you're doing it.
I hope this video was useful and if you want to learn even more about Midjourney
and how to get the most out of it, you will love this video which introduces
you to a bunch of tips and tricks on how to do interesting stuff with AI.
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