What A Difference A Year Makes In Visual AI

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Hello friend,

How are you? I hope you had a nice summer.

Getting back to business, I bet you also like to spend some time catching up on the latest tech trends.

AI is likely somewhere at the top.

Roughly a year ago I published a story that covers my analysis of various AI image generators that just broke out, tips, and predictions. AI-generated image-generated image-generated image-generated image-generated image-generated image-generated image

What is AI-Generated Image?

To create this story I tried some of the image generators and shared the results and my observations.

So how visual AI has changed in just one year?

Let’s take a look at the images.

Forest view

If you look at the primary improvements AI image generators have made in the past year, you’ll most likely hit these areas:

Realism: AI-generated images have become more realistic and hard to distinguish from real ones.

Efficient: AI-generating models have become more efficient. Meta even claims their art-generating model is best-in-class.

Quality: The generated image can often achieve high quality. And of course much faster than humans.

Refinement: You’ll also find fewer visual errors in the current crop of generators compared to last year. See my example below.

Accessibility: These days more people have more access to AI-image generators with mind-boggling offerings with many tools offered for free or with a high count of free credits.

At this rate, no wonder Europol predicts that by the year 2026, AI could be responsible for creating up to 90% of all media content.

Incredible!

Tree view

As I was preparing this week for a keynote speech on AI for Nonprofits for an upcoming event down in the Florida Keys, I came across an image I created exactly a year ago on Stable Diffusion.

I was curious to see what the same prompt and tool yielded a year later.

First off, to give you some context, I am a long-time fan of Flemish painters like Pieter Bruegel.

So, I aimed to generate an image bearing his unique style like this timeless masterpiece:

The Peasant Wedding Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567)