I was generating pictures to use for a little game I made with my six and ten year old kids. They were so excited to see us go from idea to execution so quickly, they were laughing and we had a ton of fun. The only thing that disappointed me was I got throttled. We’d need to pay for API image gen to get it even faster.

I made a logo for an internal product that wouldn’t have had a logo otherwise at our company. I also make a lot of shitpost memes to my friends to trash talk in the long running turn based war game we’ve all been playing, like “make a cartoony image of a dog man and a Greek giant beating up a devil” and the picture it gave was just hilarious and perfect, like an old timey Popeye cartoon.

Two years ago I was spending three hours using local models like Stable Diffusion to get exactly what I wanted. I had to inpaint and generate 100 variations which would have been insanely expensive if I wasn’t powering it with my own hardware.

Now I get something good in minutes, it’s crazy really.

Thanks. Which service do you use please? I'm wanting to try a paid service, just want to know which ones people recommend.

I've used Midjourney and chatGPT. Midjourney is better for rapid iteration, cycling through options faster, and to a large extent getting "weirder". It's easier to tweak using parameters.

ChatGPT is far, far superior (especially now) when you want something more specific that you've already imagined. But it's slower, and unlike Midjourney you don't get four versions to choose to build and iterate on, you get a single image that takes longer to load.

    > four versions to choose to build and iterate on

How does this work? How do you ask a model to produce four different variations? Or do they have four different models run the same inference?

There's some noise in the process, so you won't get the same results if you ask the same model the same prompt 4 times. Most of the services that do this just ask the same model 4 times with a different random seed, as far as I can tell.

You don't ask to run four models, it's just that every single prompt you give it will return four models. You can then choose to have one of them iterated on, or upscaled.

If you're still not sure let me know and I'll show a screenshot.

Feels like you didn't answer the question. i know you weren't who was asked, but still.

> They were so excited to see us go from idea to execution so quickly

They're learning to expect to skip the most important part of creating something.

> they were laughing and we had a ton of fun

I'm a parent so I think I get the appeal, but this to be is like saying "they were laughing and having fun while reading and composing legal briefs." I don't see the advantage, and any momentary benefit comes at the cost of a longer-term loss.

The new ChatGPT image generation is insane. It's available on the free tier, just strongly rate limited.