AI has had a tremendous impact in the few short years that it’s been made available to the general public. One area where it’s really breaking ground and showing incredible promise is in AI art generation. Now, there’s an entire philosophical debate that can centre around whether or not it classifies as “art,” but few can deny how powerful AI image generators have become in just a few years.
While AI-generated art certainly isn’t perfect (seven-fingered human hands, for example), it can produce fantastic graphics that can be turned into t-shirts, posters, digital graphics, and many other printed materials for personal or business use.
If you’re looking to get your feet wet in the burgeoning world of AI-generated art, here are a few tips to get started:
The first thing you’ll need is access to an online AI image generator. Various LLMs and AI innovators have developed their own, ranging from the ever-popular DALLE-3 by OpenAI, MidJourney for Discord-based image generation, and Grok for a wider variety of prompt possibilities. All of these (and others) allow you to enter prompts and receive one or more outputs, but your specific results may vary quite a bit and there’s certainly a learning curve involved.
Once you’ve found a preferred image generator, it’s usually best to consult an instruction manual on how to generate prompts efficiently. Usually, you’ll be able to specify a style such as pixel art, black & white photographic quality, camera lens settings, and specific elements (e.g. three kittens sitting at a table drinking tea).
They say we stand on the shoulders of giants and fortunately, a lot of prompt ideas have already been tried and tested by other users online. A great way to take inspiration is to see public galleries that include the exact prompt they used to generate images you like. Your results will always be a little (and sometimes very) different, but it can give you a great starting point for designing your own images.
Nearly all image generators allow you to download and output the image files in convenient formats like JPEG or PDF, so they’re already good to go if you want to make prints of them.
What you may want to do, however, is tinker a little with your image manually or by using another AI software tool. Sometimes, you end up with images that might look great but the characters have multiple fingers or something is awfully off (uncanny valley) about their face or hair, for example. There are many AI programs that can refine existing AI images to resolve these common problems.
Manually editing takes a little more effort but fortunately, free and quality software such as Canva can substitute for Photoshop and other professional software if you aren’t too adept at graphic design. This is particularly useful for text, which AI sometimes struggles to get – especially if it’s more than just one short word. Inserting your business slogan or a catchy phrase is often best done yourself.
When you’re happy with your AI image and you’ve got it to look just how you want, take it to a reputable print shop like Print on Demand to take it from the digital world to the real world.
Print graphics in just about any media with Print on Demand.
