New AI image generator appears to have figured out text

A new AI image generator, Ideogram, appears to have figured out how to generate text in images that isn’t abstract gibberish.

Ideogram is a newly launched AI image generator in the same vein as DALL-E 2 and Adobe Firefly. However, unlike the other competitors on the market, like Midjourney, it appears to have figured out text.

Text in AI images can be difficult for it to render. The specifics of how text is formed have yet to be conquered properly by some of the big players in the space.

Adobe has a text-to-typography section on Firefly AI, but it uses your words as a base and then generates an image within the confines of the text. When we tried text in DALL-E 2 for instance, we saw a lot of abstract images that could be text.

Ideogram’s AI, however, can produce clear and readable text when specified. In fact, a large part of its community’s output is typography or logos. Of course, Ideogram functions similarly to other generators.

These generators have no concept of context and need highly specific instructions to source data and produce an image. There’s also no way to see where the image data was sourced from.

Ideogram AI isn’t perfect but it’s better than the rest

While Ideogram’s AI can get close in some cases and even produce perfect results, the AI isn’t perfect as of yet. Multiple attempts lead us to see images with huge mistakes or similar gibberish we’ve found in competitors. It is, however, incredibly close to a winning hook.

While Ideogram is great at handling short phrases, it struggles with much bigger ones. We inputted a “woman, angel wings, light behind, holding leaflet that reads: “Esports players using usernames is cringe””. This produced four images that made no sense, but the angel did come out looking quite good.

It also appears that a lot of the AI’s designs that come out of the typography side of things are often in similar scope, with a fun bubbly text and emphasis on cartoon art.

Ideogram launched this week and is currently available to the public by signing up via Google. While it’s relatively fresh, there also appears to be no monetization for the AI as of now, but this could change very soon.