5 Best Free AI Text to Art Generators to Create an Image From What You Type

These free AI apps can take a sentence you type and turn it into a realistic painting or an image.

Is there anything artificial intelligence can't do? It seems like every month, there's a mesmerizing new technological breakthrough. The trending breakthrough is how AI can now take a sentence you type and turn it into a painting or an image. And you can try it right now with these free apps.

Google recently announced its Imagen AI tool that takes simple sentences and turns them into photorealistic graphic designs. It's scary-cool how good the pictures look. You can try a small demo on their website, but you would only be choosing from preset prompts already fed by Google. If you want to create AI art from your writing, here are some of the best free AI text-to-image generators.

1. Nightcafe (Web): The Simplest Free Text-to-Image AI Converter

Nightcafe is the perfect example of these text-to-image apps to make your jaw drop by seeing the kind of mind-blowing creations AI can do. Type any simple English sentence, and Nightcafe will use AI to turn it into a painting.

When creating a new image, you can choose from various artistic styles like cubist, oil painting, matte, surreal, steampunk, etc. You can also add modifiers of artists, techniques, and cultural genres. Then you have to choose between two AI styles: Artistic and Coherent.

You can read about the tech jargon behind each on the website, but there's a basic difference for the lay user. The Artistic variant is better for abstract creations like showing buildings in the sky or other imaginative sentences. The Coherent version is better for realistic images with your own customizations.

Select the aspect ratio, the output resolution, and a few other settings, and you're good to go. Nightcafe will give you an original artwork based on your choices in a few minutes. All your creations are saved in your account.

When you create an account, you get five credits free, with five daily credits too. Credits determine the number of tweaks you can make in the settings of an artwork. You can also use an artwork as a base to refine it, which costs more credits. And yes, you can download your artwork for free in small resolution.

2. Starry AI (Web, Android, iOS): Text to Image AI Art With Granular Control

Starry AI turns text into AI artwork images like the other apps in this list. But unlike many others, it offers granular control over certain aspects that make the results a lot more personal.

You'll start by entering a random phrase and choosing between two AI engines: Altair (produces dream-like images, more abstract) and Orion (produces "unreal reality," often more cohesive). Then choose from 16 art styles, canvas size, or aspect ratio, and optionally add your own custom image to use as a base. Selecting a custom image is usually a good idea in these apps.

Starry AI lets you use extra credits to lengthen the AI's runtime so that you get a better final image. Similarly, you can spend credits to tell the AI how closely to stick to your text. And finally, when the image is generated, you can spend credits to upscale the image to download high-resolution AI artworks.

Plus, you don't always have to pay for these credits. Starry AI lets you earn free credits every day or week by watching ads or sharing your creations on different social media.

Download: Starry AI for Android | iOS (Free)

3. Dall-E Mini (Web): Get a Taste of the Famous OpenAI Dall-E

AI research lab OpenAI created the original and most popular version of an AI text-to-image generator, the Dall-E. Currently, the Dall-E 2 is wowing netizens with its ability to turn natural language into images, but it is in closed beta. You can join the waitlist and hopefully soon get to play with the online app.

Until then, you can use the Dall-E Mini, an open-source version of the original AI model available for public use. The machine learns descriptions by reading captions of other images on the internet and applies it to whatever phrase you type. You don't need to register for an account to sign up, and you get unlimited tries for your images.

Type your sentence (and be as specific as possible) and hit Run. It'll take some time, but Dall-E Mini will soon give you nine different images made from your sentence. You can save any or all images to your hard drive. Unlike other apps, there are no further enhancements or customizations in Dall-E Mini, but it is the simplest text-to-image AI generator and offers unlimited tries for free.

4. Dream by Wombo (Android, iOS): Simple, Free, Unlimited AI Text to Image Art Generator

Every AI-based text-to-image art generator is either paid, runs on a credit system, or has other restrictions. Dream by Wombo bucks all those limitations to let you create unlimited artworks from your text in many styles.

It's as simple as creating an account, writing a sentence, and selecting a style. Current styles include, among others, Ghibli, Dali, Love, Robots, Psychic, Synthwave, Baroque, and Dark Fantasy. Let Wombo generate the image, and you can immediately ask it to develop another or download the one you liked.

You can use either the web app or the mobile app, but as our detailed Dream by Wombo review shows, the mobile version offers a few more features. Specifically, you can add a base image for the AI to use as a reference, which always helps in refining to get what you want.

Download: Dream by Wombo for Android | iOS (Free)

5. Pixray (Web): AI Text to Image Generator With Custom Codes for Geeks

Pixray is a text-to-art generator that you can run in a browser, on your computer, or with an API, all for free. It has a simple interface, but with its customizable AI engines and extensive documentation for custom codes, geeks will have a great time with it.

The default interface is simple. First, add your sentence as you normally would in any app. Then choose from the different AI render engines in the "drawer": pixel generates pixel art, vqgan generates GAN-images (often trippy or realistic), and clipdraw/line_sketch generates stroke-based images as if it was a drawing and strokes were drawn down. This in itself will give you fantastic images, but the fun part is the last section, Settings.

In the extensive Pixray documentation, you'll find that you can tweak the AI settings in several ways. For example, you can add artists or styles, define quality, iterations, or scale, and discover detailed ways to change your artwork through the drawer, display, filter, video, and image settings. It's a bit of heavy reading, but no coding is involved.

So Is AI Killing Artists?

The different AI text-to-image generators in this article are all impressive in their own way. In fact, the most impressive are the two that we can't access yet: Google's Imagen and OpenAI's Dall-E 2. But they're not yet ready to take over from artists.

Just like AI writing tools, while the end product seems "real" enough like it was made by a human, it still misses some things. Artists can add creativity, emotion, and a self-defined style that makes an artwork personal and original. Maybe years later, AI could evolve to that too, but artist jobs are safe as of now.