Can an AI image generator recreate our magazine cover?

We tried out AI image generators – these use artificial intelligence to create images from text descriptions.

Our festive cover for December's Which? Tech magazine celebrates our story on great value tech gifts with a purple pyramid of presents, adorned with shiny baubles and nestled amongst stars. 

December's issue also contained a feature comparing the performance of the biggest AI-powered chatbots across a variety of tasks - for a synopsis, see what is an AI chatbot and which one is best?

Our AI feature also investigated AI image generators. These image generators are programs that have been trained with a vast collection of images, which then employ sophisticated algorithms to translate text prompts into realistic or imaginative visual representations. 

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How did the AI image generators do? 

Our festive Which? Tech cover was drawn by our talented (human) illustrator.

The brief: 

A 3D rendered image of a stacked pile of purple presents, with stars in the background. Amidst the pile, there is a radio, a tablet, a pair of headphones, a laptop, a phone, a record player, and five baubles with 'Great Value' written on them. On top, there's a golden star, and below the image the headline 'GREAT VALUE GIFTS'"

And then we became curious - how would an AI cope with these instructions? So we tried it, taking three of the most popular image generators: Adobe Firefly, Bing Image Creator and Midjourney.

Adobe Firefly

Adobe's Firefly image generator is trained on images from the public domain and Adobe’s own proprietary image library. This allows it to eschew some of the ethical and copyright concerns associated with AI image generators, some of which are trained on millions of images taken indiscriminately from online sources, without the consent of the original artists. 

It didn’t do an amazing job of our cover, though, ignoring our requests for ‘Great Value’ text and creating three mutated products that wouldn’t look out of place on a Star Trek set, plus some super-wide headphones only suitable for colossal craniums.  

Bing Image Creator

Bing Chat is the only AI text tool with a built-in image generator, powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E 3. Image Creator can also be accessed on its standalone website, or through the Microsoft Designer application.   

Tasked with recreating our cover, Image Creator's effort actually looks pretty great at first glance; but a closer inspection reveals a bizarre infatuation with radios, seemingly at the cost of including the phone, laptop and record player we also asked for. Its attempt at headphones is also notably strange, with a pair that would only fit perfectly if you happen to have a head the exact same dimensions as an iPad.

Image Creator also ignored our request for a headline and a handful of inscribed baubles, instead just producing some garbled text on the side of a present – because everyone dreams of finding a cryptic ‘Gret Gvaue’ box under the Christmas tree.

Midjourney

Midjourney is the most popular AI image generator available right now, but it's only available through the social messaging platform Discord.

Its attempt has some impressively disarticulated headphones, with inverted ear cups that would be perfect for sharing music with the person you're wedged shoulder-to-shoulder with on a commuter train. 

It seems it was a bit star-struck, too, filling the air and littering the floor with them. It even introduced a six-pointed star, complete with its own star-shaped belly button. We're not too sure what the object in the bottom right is, although it appears to be something halfway between a robot vacuum cleaner and a sailboat.

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The future of AI art

Playing around with these AI image generators does offer an intriguing glimpse into the future of visual creation, but we think that it's safe to say that for now and with tasks like these, they remain a fascinating but flawed endeavour. 

The images produced here are much more likely to evoke a chuckle at their uncanny glitches than inspire awe at their artistic prowess.

However, it is worth keeping in mind that these tools are doing things that would be almost unimaginable just a few years ago. Over the next few years, it's likely they'll become much more capable, as well as more refined. It seems unlikely that AI art is going anywhere, and with that, debates around the ethics of using them and their ability to replace human artistry will ferment big questions we'll need to grapple with.

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This article is adapted from an original feature published in Which? Tech Magazine, December 2023, by Jonny Martin. Research carried out August and September 2023.