What are AI Generative Art tools?
AI generative art tools are software solutions that leverage artificial intelligence to create, edit, or enhance visual content from text descriptions, existing images, or other inputs.
These tools span various creative domains including image generation, video creation, 3D modeling, and animation, making art creation more accessible to both professionals and hobbyists.
Understanding the AI Art Generation Landscape
The AI generative art landscape has evolved dramatically in recent years, and even months, with new tools and AI models emerging almost weekly. In this guide, I'll try to explore as deeply as possible the many aspects that could fall under AI Generative Art to give you a comprehensive overview.
Why trust me?
As the founder of Melies, a software that helps filmmakers create stunning movies using AI, I have a unique perspective on AI generative art tools as creating an AI film requires many different components (from character design to writing scenario, generating images, videos, sound effects or music using AI) which has led me to keep an eye open on the entire landscape and try many different tools, many of which are now integrated within Melies.
The Major Categories of AI Art Generation
AI Image Generation
AI image generation has evolved dramatically since its inception. From early experiments with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to today's sophisticated diffusion models, the technology has made remarkable strides between 2020 and 2024, offering unprecedented creative control and photorealistic outputs.
The landscape continues to evolve with several key players shaping the industry:
Midjourney still dominates the market by masterfully balancing realism with artistic expression. While it started on Discord (which is the largest AI Generative art community), it now offers a web interface providing granular control over many parameters like texture, color palette, and brush strokes. It is also well known for its good character consistency.
While being a newer player, Black Forest Labs has released recently a new set of open-source models called FLUX that quickly became a reference by leading all benchmarks, and having a very fast model called FLUX Schnell able to generate photorealistic images in a few seconds.
Stable Diffusion remains the cornerstone of open-source image generation. Its reliability and precision in producing high-resolution images, combined with an extensive ecosystem of models and tools, make it ideal for professional projects. The release of Stable Diffusion XL further elevated image quality while simplifying prompt requirements.
Recraft and Ideogram also provide compelling AI Image Generation models currently at the top of Text to Image Models leaderboard.
We can also mention DALL-E from OpenAI, which used to be proposed as a standalone image generation tool, but is now only available via ChatGPT only, Adobe Firefly that provides seamless Creative Cloud integration.
AI Video Generation
AI video generation has seen explosive growth since OpenAI's announcement of Sora in early 2024. While not released publicly, other products have now been released to generate realistic videos.Image-to-video is still the most widely used, giving more creative control to creators, but text-to-video is now also compelling for quick visualization since Hailuo AI Minimax made an impressive release. Finally, video-to-video transformations enable modifying existing videos with different visual styles. This versatility allows creators to choose the most appropriate approach and combine multiple techniques in their workflow.
Now, most of the AI video generation tools provide user-friendly interfaces, but also API access either directly or through platforms like Replicate and Fal.ai.
Here’s an overview of the companies providing video models:
Runway provides many different tools for AI video generation, the most prominent it’s Gen-3 Alpha image-to-video. They also released Act-One, allowing video-to-video control over characters.
Luma launched Dream Machine and was one of the first to introduce a start frame / end frame for image-to-video generation allowing more creative control
Kling AI has impressed with the quality of its video generation, but also offer a distinctive feature called Motion Brush, allowing very precise control over image animation
Hailuo AI introduced MiniMax, one of the most recent products that has very impressive consistency and generates video very close to the prompt. It has also impressed by its ability to generate real human-like emotions in characters.
We could also mention Mochi by Genmo, currently the best open source video generation model, Pika which was one of the first companies to release a video model.
AI Audio Generation
The AI audio generation landscape has expanded dramatically, offering tools for creating music, voices, and sound effects. This category has seen significant innovation in both quality and usability.
AI Music Generation
Suno is leading this space with their latest V3.5 model capable of generating improved song structure and highly enjoyable output quality. Users can easily create custom songs in any style with their own lyrics. Udio, Soundful and more recently Mureka have also emerged as strong contenders in this rapidly advancing field.
AI Sound Effects
ElevenLabs, a leading voice synthesis company, also offers advanced AI-generated sound effects. has become increasingly sophisticated, offering natural-sounding voices with emotional range and style control.
AI Art Communities and Model Marketplaces
The emergence of open-source models for AI Art have prompted the need for platforms to host and run these models. While Hugging Face remains the leading platform for hosting open-source AI models, some platforms such as CivitAI have become their equivalent with a focus on AI Art.
With Replicate and Fal.ai now providing easy inference APIs for many open-source models, many platforms have taken advantage of these trends, focusing more on usability and features than the models.
Emerging Trends and Future Directions
The main concern of the field has been around copyright, but I won't go into details here.
While the AI Generative Art landscape is evolving really fast, we can see some trends emerging:
1. Multi-Modal Generation
Large Language Models are now capable of generating text, images and sounds. Meta Movie Gen exemplifies this trend, though not yet released, by promising integrated video and audio generation with advanced editing capabilities.
2. Real-Time Generation
The push toward faster generation times enables new use cases like live streaming and interactive experiences. FLUX Schnell's ability to generate photorealistic images in seconds demonstrates this trend's potential, which should continue for other types of media.
3. Open-source models closing the gap
Just as OpenAI has gradually lost its lead to Mistral and Llama in the LLM space, open-source image generation models like FLUX now rival industry leader Midjourney. While video and sound generation remain dominated by closed-source models, projects like Mochi suggest this gap will close soon.
