Summary of AI Art Tools

1. Overview. The long term trend is clearly towards AI 'chat' tools that do everything. That is, the user enters information in the form of voice, text or images and the tool responds with information, code, images and video as needed.

There will still always be AI tools that focus on image and video. They will do that because they can produce the best user interface for these things by maintaining focus. Also AI Art generally uses a very different set of underlying technical approaches than are needed for 'chat' tools and these are more readily available to relatively smaller companies without the massive budgets needed for 'chat'.

To gain access to the best AI Art tools you may need to consider paying. While many AI Chat tools give you free access to their older versions, there is no such dynamic with pure AI Art tools. It takes considerable computing power to produce the beautiful images that AI Art is capable of. This has to be paid for in some way so the solutions fall into these categories:

a. AI Art tools that charge a monthly subscription. This is not necessarily expensive. Most images on this website along with many more were produced with a Midjourney subscription of just $ 10 per month. There are many alternatives as described below.

a1. Midjourney.com - pricing at 16 March 2024
Here is the pricing plan page for Midjourney.

a2. Leonardo.AI Leonardo.ai
Has a FREE DAILY RESET ALLOWANCE for making AI images, and some good options

Leonardo FAQs inc. free trial information

a3. Ideogram.AI Ideogram.ai Has a FREE OPTION which may be a little slow etc but is nevertheless FREE.
Ideogram.AI Ideogram Pricing page 17 March 2024.

a4. Lexica.art
We have not tried their generation tool yet. Pricing is below, pricing page here.

b. AI Art tools where you buy credits as you use them. This is the case with DreamStudio where there is no contract except insofar as you buy credits from time to time for $ 10 or whatever to allow you to produce a set number of pictures or similar limitation.
b1. DreamStudio.ai - pricing at 16 March 2024
Note this is DreamStudio by Stability.AI
Some FREE INITIAL CREDITS - see for information the Pricing page for Stability AI and DreamStudio AI
[1] "All new users are granted 25 FREE credits upon creating an account"
[2] "Credits are priced at $10 per 1,000 credits, which is enough credits for roughly 5,000 SDXL 1.0 images"

b2. Nightcafe Studio
A long established destination for those creating art. Users buy credits that allow them to use various AI Art features.
Pricing page for Nightcafe - Nightcafe Pricing

c. AI Art tools that are part of established products. All of the major software tools that have been around for a decade or more have by now integrated AI Art capability into their latest versions. Some of them are fighting hard to retain market share against newcomers. This is particularly true of search engines, not least Google which has had a dominant share, and Microsoft which sees this as a huge opportunity.

c1. Bing Image Creator from Microsoft - Microsoft Bing with Copilot.
Microsoft have a complicated commercial relation with OpenAI who are a leader in AI tools. DALL-E 3 is OpenAI's latest text-to-image AI model and it is believed that Microsoft use it in a number of their tools.
It can be difficult to track Microsoft's branding and interface for its AI tools which are evolving rapidly as they try to gain an audience while not cannibalising their Bing Search business. In general though, as with Search, use of this is sort of FREE even though (16 March 2024) "We can only generate images for users signed in with a personal Microsoft account".

d. AI Art tools that run on your own computer. These are essentially free to the user once they have downloaded the relevant files. The computing power is supplied by the laptop or phone the user owns. If more computing power is needed then the user generally pays for more in the 'cloud'.

d1. Stability.AI - see above for online tool DreamStudio.ai
They are a top 'open source' provider of AI Art tools, which means FREE software/files which you run on your own computer rather than them running it for you.
Minor tech skills may be needed!