Key Takeaways
- Initial AI applications like chatbots and image generation helped popularize apps like ChatGPT and Midjourney.
- Google now offers deep AI integrations in its apps and Gemini chatbot assistant for image generation, besides other things.
- Imagen 3 on Gemini now provides free access to realistic text-to-image models, but may seeem like a disservice to recent Pixel buyers.
AI continues evolving but just a handful of initial applications captivated the masses — chatbot-style interactions and image generation from textual prompts. These factors alone helped the likes of ChatGPT and Midjourney skyrocket in popularity. Now, Google has several deep AI integrations in its apps, as well as a chatbot assistant called Gemini that can handle image generation too, making it one of our favorite AI apps for Android. The company recently gave Gemini’s image generation abilities a shot in the arm.
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Google pulled the wraps off Imagen 3 at I/O earlier this year, and the tool has since been used behind the scenes for apps like Pixel Studio. It allows users to prompt the AI to generate images, and then selectively refine the result in multiple iterations. The app seems to work well with images of people, but was limited to the latest Pixel 9 series. A recent visit to the Gemini service on the web revealed the service also gives access to Imagen 3, even on the free tier (via NotebookCheck).
Google had been testing Imagen 3 on Gemini for the last few months, through the AI Test Kitchen. After a few months of testing, the company seems to have decided to give all users access to these image generation capabilities, because we are seeing a pop-up about it on Gemini. While the Pixel Studio app converted stylistic definitions of your prompt into drop-down menus with alternatives, Google’s deployment on Gemini instead focuses on image sharpness, detail, and more photorealism than the outgoing model.
Fast progress might seem like a disservice to paying customers
On the one hand, free access to Google’s flagship text-to-image model with surprising realism is a huge plus, there’s a non-zero number of customers on the flipside who bought the Pixel 9 series to enjoy the convenience of the Pixel Studio app. The phone isn’t even a year old at this point, and Google making Imagen 3 so easily accessible might seem like a disservice to the Pixel buyers who forked real cash for the AI smarts.
However, given the rapid rate of advancements in AI, we aren’t surprised Google is happy to offer Imagen 3 to the masses for free while it probably works on a different generative model with better capabilities for the next generation. In such cases, there’s a strong argument to call such features ‘bloatware’ on phones if they are available for free just months later.
That said, Imagen 3 on Gemini is a step forward for people using the chatbot to whip up images for a college presentation or just memes to keep the group chat lively.