AI image generation: a complete guide
A few years ago, creating realistic images by computer required advanced knowledge of
Photoshop, 3D modeling, and hours of work. Today, you type a sentence and within
seconds you have an image generated from scratch. It’s technology that still feels like
magic even to people who use it every day.
But like any powerful tool, AI image generation has its nuances, limitations, and better
ways to use it.
How AI image generation works
The leading image generation models use a technique called diffusion. Simply put: the
model learns from billions of image-text pairs during training. When you write a prompt, it
starts from “noise” — random pixels — and progressively refines them until it creates
something that matches the description.
The final result is an original image, not one copied from somewhere. But the model was
trained on existing images, which raises important debates about copyright.
The main tools
Midjourney is recognized for its exceptional aesthetic quality. It generates images with
impressive artistic polish, especially for photography, digital art, and concept art. It works
through Discord and has a slightly steeper learning curve. It’s paid, but worth it for serious
users.
DALL-E 3, integrated into ChatGPT Plus, is the most accessible for beginners. The
interface is simple, it understands natural language instructions very well, and the
ChatGPT integration allows you to refine results through conversation.
Stable Diffusion is open source — you can run it locally on your own computer if you have
a decent graphics card. It’s the most flexible of the three, with a massive community of
styles and modifications. More complex to use, but with no content restrictions and no
recurring cost.
Adobe Firefly is Adobe’s bet, trained on licensed images, which addresses part of the
copyright problem. It integrates well with Photoshop.
How to write good image prompts
Prompt quality makes all the difference. Be specific: instead of “dog on a beach”, try
“golden retriever running on wet sand at sunset, realistic photography, golden hour light,
35mm camera”.
Include artistic style when you want something specific: “oil painting style”, “magazine
photography”, “watercolor illustration”, “science fiction concept art”.
Limitations you need to know
Text within images is still a weak point for almost all models — letters come out distorted
or wrong. Hands with the correct number of fingers are also a historical challenge, though
it’s improving. And images of specific real people raise serious privacy and ethical use
concerns.