Stuck on the DALL·E waitlist? (You are on the waitlist, aren’t you?) Here are some alternative AI art generators you can use, from complex artificial intelligence to simpler toys to play around with.
1. Wombo Art
A fun web tool (also available as a mobile app) that turns any text prompt into a dreamy, fantasy-style images. Free to use, but difficult to control meaningfully. Try it out here.
2. NightCafé Studio
A web app with a simple user interface, allowing you to combine text prompts with style instructions, resulting in surreal and dreamlike scenes. It’s not good at creating specific objects, but with luck and perseverence, you can certainly generate… a Vibe.
NightCafe can also ‘evolve’ and ‘upscale’ images, as well as applying painting styles to an image you provide – if you want to give the view from your apartment window a ‘Starry Night’ look, for example.
It’s free to try and create your first five images, but after that you’ll need to buy credits – purchased in bulk, it’s as little as $0.08 an image. See a gallery of popular NightCafé images or give it a go yourself.
3. DALL·E Mini (no relation!)
A name change is surely imminent for the so-called ‘DALL·E mini’, which actually has no connection whatsoever to DALL·E proper, other than a similar goal of generating images.
But although the images might be rather low-quality, as it has the advantage of actually being available to the general public to use. So it’s rather captured the imagination of Twitter.
The lo-fi outputs are good enough for deep-fried memes, the fact it can do this at all is quite impressive, and as usage is almost entirely unregulated, there are no DALL·E like limits on sharing images of politicians, faces, or tasteless jokes. It’s free to use – try it out here.
4. StarryAI
This app is powered by similar tech to NightCafé, with similarly dreamy results. Again, you can supply a text prompt along with a choice of styles (be aware, literally all these selectors do is add a pre-determined text string to your prompt, e.g: if you choose the ‘ArtStation’ style, it just adds ‘trending on ArtStation’ to your prompt)
Results are impressionistic to say the least, but it is possible to generate some truly remarkable images with StarryAI. The app is free to download and you get 5 free credits a day – you can buy more for $0.08/credit, at the cheapest bulk rate. One more thing: image creation can take several minutes. Definitely worth experimenting with – get it here.
5. Midjourney
It’s hard to find out too much about this AI art tool that’s currently in private beta – certainly it draws on some of the same principles as tools we’ve already covered, but the creative quality of images seems to be substantially higher.
It might be that, with a handpicked user pool, Midjourney is nurturing creatives who go that extra mile, enhancing raw outputs in Photoshop and so on – or maybe it really is that good. (Although there is lots of ‘made with Midjourney’ work online, there aren’t many screenshots of the UX or recordings of the end-to-end process.) Apply for the beta here.
