Technology Google finally makes its astonishing AI image tool public - kind of - Google Imagen

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The battle of the AI art generators has been heating up as big tech giants enter the ring. While the space is currently dominated by DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, Microsoft, Meta and Google have all announced text-to-image (or text-to-video) tools on the way. Now Google's just made its offering public – or at least part of it.

Google first gave us a glimpse of Imagen, its AI image generator, back in May with the publication of a proof-of-concept paper and the launch of website showcasing some of the results of the tool. It's just released limited features of the tool to the public – and they're bizarrely specific (for more on how AI art generators work, see our piece on how to use DALL-E 2).

A product created in Google's AI Test Kitchen, Imagen is a powerful AI text-to-image art generator that can turn written prompts into convincing images. The results shared so far suggest that it can hold its own against the best AI art generators, which have generated a lot of controversy due to their increasingly convincing results and concerns about copyright, abuse and the future of artists' jobs.

Despite the controversy, the genie truly seems to be out of the bottle with major tech heavyweights entering the scene. Microsoft Designer looks set to offer what sounds like a form of AI clip art while Meta's Make-a-Video promises to offer a text-to-video generator. Google has beaten them to a public release with the launch of Imagen(opens in new tab) in beta. but it's holding back on most of the tool's power.

 
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    Yeah Tom, me too sorry for your loss buddy my mom told me she finds out her olds friend died from Google searching them. She had not talked to one of her old friends in a year and found out she died from Google. Also another one in the same session. RIP all of them my sincere condolences Tom
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    We usually let them do their memorials there in the morning if they want to and I'll make them some snacks and drinks. There was one guy named Tom that came in like every night and would sit by himself and get a bunch of soup and a glass of wine. idk why but he LOVED our fucking soup, like he would order a fucking quart of it at a time and would always get so sad when we stop doing it for the summer.
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    But he also loved our calamari, which is another thing I hate but it sells super well so I can't change it. There was one day he came in and was asking me how to make it, because he tried to at home once in the off season when we stop running it and he really wanted it lol
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