Oh great, now Google has a terrifying AI image generator

AI images created with Google Imagen (Image credit: Google)

Just a few weeks ago, the art world was, to use internet parlance, 'shooketh' by the power of OpenAI's DALL·E 2, which can transform written phrases and sentences into terrifyingly accurate AI-generated images. And now it looks like it has competition, courtesy of a little-known tech company called Google.

Google has just announced its own text-to-image generator, titled 'Imagen' (John Lennon would be proud), and it's perhaps even more impressive than DALL·E 2. One thing's for sure – AI image generators are here to stay. Because who needs to download Photoshop when Google can create any image you like?

"a text-to-image diffusion model with an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding." As with DALL·E 2, the best way to describe the tool is simply to show you some images – and the text prompts that generated them:

does anyone else get a deep sense of dread from DALL-E or Imagen -type software?is there a reasonable expectation that the power of the underlying technology will remain directed towards "neat little image generation"? http://t.co/qb0LBYTQpR

"Not gonna lie, didn't expect "illustrators" to be one of the first human jobs that artificial intelligence completely displaces but here we are," one user tweeted when DALL·E 2 was announced, and another added, "The implication of AI replacing artists was always there, and now the day has unfortunately come."

We wouldn't go that far – while the tools are impressive, the results are still pretty random. But like the most terrifying deepfakes, it's the potential for misinformation that's scary – AI content creation clearly isn't going anywhere, and the results are only becoming more impressive.

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