For exam­ple, when I first start­ed play­ing around with AI art, I signed up for a ser­vice that gave me 25 free cred­its. It was great for mak­ing a few pro­file pic­tures and some weird art for my blog. But I burned through those cred­its in a sin­gle after­noon. To keep going, I had to sub­scribe to a month­ly plan. This is how most of these com­pa­nies make mon­ey. They let you try the tool for free, get you hooked on how cool it is, and then ask you to pay up.

There are dif­fer­ent kinds of "free" you'll run into.

First, you have the free tri­als. This is what I just described. You get a lim­it­ed num­ber of cred­its or a cer­tain amount of time to use the tool. Mid­jour­ney, one of the most pop­u­lar and high-qual­i­­ty AI image gen­er­a­tors, used to have a free tri­al, but they stopped it. Now, you have to pay from the start. Tools like Leonardo.Ai and Play­ground AI still offer free cred­its that refresh dai­ly or month­ly. This is a good option if you're a casu­al user and just want to exper­i­ment. I use Play­ground AI for quick mock­ups some­times. I get a cer­tain num­ber of free images a day, but the qual­i­ty isn't always as good as the paid ver­sions, and some of the more advanced fea­tures are locked.

Then there are com­plete­ly free tools. These are less com­mon, but they exist. The most well-known is prob­a­bly Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion. It's an open-source mod­el, which means the code is pub­licly avail­able, and any­one can use it, mod­i­fy it, and build on top of it. You can down­load and run it on your own com­put­er if you have a pow­er­ful enough graph­ics card (a good GPU is impor­tant here). This gives you com­plete free­dom. You can gen­er­ate as many images as you want with­out any cred­its or sub­scrip­tions. I tried this myself. Set­ting it up took some work. I had to install Python, Git, and a bunch of oth­er soft­ware. It wasn't a sim­ple one-click install. But once it was run­ning, I had total con­trol. I could gen­er­ate thou­sands of images, train the AI on my own art, and real­ly dig into how it works. The down­side is that you need some tech­ni­cal skill and a good com­put­er. If you don't have that, it can be frus­trat­ing.

There are also web-based ver­sions of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion that oth­er peo­ple host for you. Web­sites like Dream­Stu­dio (from the cre­ators of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion) give you some free cred­its to start. Oth­er plat­forms use Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion as their back­end and offer a cer­tain num­ber of free gen­er­a­tions per day. These are eas­i­er to use than run­ning it your­self, but you lose some of the con­trol and you're back to deal­ing with cred­it lim­its.

Anoth­er big play­er offer­ing a free ser­vice is Microsoft's Bing Image Cre­ator. It uses a ver­sion of DALL‑E, anoth­er pow­er­ful AI mod­el from Ope­nAI. It's gen­uine­ly free. You sign in with your Microsoft account and you can cre­ate images. They give you "boosts" or "cred­its" that let you gen­er­ate images faster. If you run out of boosts, your images just take longer to cre­ate; you don't have to pay. I've used this a lot for quick, sim­ple images. It's inte­grat­ed into their search engine, so it's easy to access. The qual­i­ty is pret­ty good for a free tool. The main lim­i­ta­tion is that Microsoft has stricter con­tent fil­ters on it, so you have less free­dom to cre­ate con­tro­ver­sial or edgy images.

Can­va also has a free AI image gen­er­a­tor built into its design plat­form. It's called "Text to Image" and it's based on Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion. If you have a free Can­va account, you get a cer­tain num­ber of life­time cred­its to try it out. After that, you need to upgrade to a Pro account. I find it use­ful for cre­at­ing sim­ple graph­ics or tex­tures to use in a larg­er design project with­in Can­va itself. It’s con­ve­nient because it’s right there where you’re already work­ing.

So, how do you actu­al­ly use these things? Let's walk through a cou­ple of them.

How to Use Bing Image Cre­ator (a tru­ly free option):

1. Go to the Bing Image Cre­ator web­site. You can just search for "Bing Image Cre­ator."
2. Sign in with your Microsoft account. If you don't have one, you'll need to cre­ate one. It's free.
3. Type a descrip­tion of the image you want in the prompt box. This is the most impor­tant part. Be as descrip­tive as pos­si­ble. Instead of "a dog," try "a pho­to­re­al­is­tic gold­en retriev­er pup­py sit­ting in a field of daisies at sun­set, with a soft, warm light."
4. Click "Cre­ate."
5. Wait for the images to gen­er­ate. If you have "boosts," this will take about 15–30 sec­onds. If not, it might take a few min­utes. It will give you four dif­fer­ent images to choose from.
6. Down­load the one you like. You can click on an image to see it larg­er and then down­load it.

It real­ly is that straight­for­ward. You're not going to get the same lev­el of artis­tic con­trol or raw qual­i­ty as a paid tool like Mid­jour­ney, but for zero cost, it's amaz­ing.

How to Use Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion on Your Own Com­put­er (the pow­er user option):

This is more involved, but it gives you ulti­mate free­dom. The most pop­u­lar way to do this is with a user inter­face called AUTOMATIC1111.

1. Check your hard­ware. You need a mod­ern graph­ics card (an NVIDIA GPU with at least 6GB of VRAM is rec­om­mend­ed). This is the biggest bar­ri­er for most peo­ple.
2. Install the nec­es­sary soft­ware. You'll need to install Python 3.10.6 and Git. These are tools devel­op­ers use, and the instal­la­tion process involves some com­­mand-line work. There are plen­ty of step-by-step guides on YouTube that can walk you through this.
3. Down­load the Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion mod­el. The core AI mod­el is a large file (sev­er­al giga­bytes) that you need to down­load from a web­site like Hug­ging Face.
4. Down­load and set up AUTOMATIC1111. You clone the project from GitHub using Git and then run a set­up file.
5. Launch the user inter­face. Once every­thing is installed, you run a file that starts a web serv­er on your com­put­er. You then access the inter­face through your web brows­er.
6. Start gen­er­at­ing. From there, it's sim­i­lar to oth­er gen­er­a­tors. You have a prompt box where you type what you want to see. But you also have dozens of oth­er set­tings you can tweak, like the sam­pling method, image size, and seed num­ber. You can also install exten­sions and cus­tom mod­els cre­at­ed by the com­mu­ni­ty to gen­er­ate spe­cif­ic styles of art.

It's a lot of work upfront, but the pay­off is that you have a com­plete­ly free and uncen­sored image gen­er­a­tor that you con­trol. No cred­its, no sub­scrip­tions, no con­tent fil­ters (oth­er than your own ethics).

The rea­son there are so many dif­fer­ent mod­els of "free" is because gen­er­at­ing these images costs mon­ey. It requires a mas­sive amount of com­put­ing pow­er. The AI mod­els are trained on huge clus­ters of pow­er­ful com­put­ers (GPUs) for weeks or months. This costs mil­lions of dol­lars in elec­tric­i­ty and hard­ware. When you gen­er­ate an image using a web ser­vice, you're using their com­put­ers. Their "free" cred­its are a mar­ket­ing cost. They're bet­ting that a cer­tain per­cent­age of free users will find the tool so use­ful that they'll become pay­ing cus­tomers.

The open-source mod­el of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion is dif­fer­ent because the com­pa­ny that cre­at­ed it, Sta­bil­i­ty AI, makes mon­ey in oth­er ways. They pro­vide ser­vices and con­sul­ta­tions to large com­pa­nies that want to use their tech­nol­o­gy. By open-sour­c­ing the basic mod­el, they build a huge com­mu­ni­ty of devel­op­ers and artists who find new and inter­est­ing ways to use their tech, which in turn acts as a mas­sive R&D and mar­ket­ing arm for them.

So, when you're look­ing for a "free" AI image gen­er­a­tor, you need to ask your­self what you real­ly need.

• Are you just curi­ous and want to make a few fun images? A ser­vice with free dai­ly cred­its like Play­ground AI or the com­plete­ly free Bing Image Cre­ator is prob­a­bly your best bet.
• Are you a hob­by­ist who wants to gen­er­ate a lot of images with­out pay­ing, and you're com­fort­able with some tech­ni­cal set­up? Run­ning Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion on your own com­put­er is the way to go.
• Are you a pro­fes­sion­al who needs the absolute high­est qual­i­ty and con­sis­ten­cy for your work? You'll prob­a­bly need to pay for a sub­scrip­tion to a ser­vice like Mid­jour­ney or a high­er tier of anoth­er gen­er­a­tor. The free options just won't give you the con­trol and qual­i­ty you need for pro­fes­sion­al work.

There's no sin­gle best answer. The "free" land­scape is always chang­ing. Com­pa­nies change their free offer­ings all the time. What is free today might require a sub­scrip­tion tomor­row. The impor­tant thing is to under­stand the busi­ness mod­el behind the ser­vice you're using. Noth­ing is ever tru­ly free. You're either pay­ing with mon­ey, with your time (for set­up and learn­ing), with your data, or by being shown ads. But if you under­stand that trade­off, you can absolute­ly get start­ed and cre­ate some incred­i­ble images with­out spend­ing a dime.