The best AI image generators have been in the news lately, but not always for the right reasons: Elon Musk's Grok-2 artificial intelligence sparked all kinds of controversy for its lack of guardrails. Google probably wants to shift the conversation in a more positive direction, as the company has just expanded access to its Image 3 generator to all US citizens, vastly increasing the number of people who can use the AI tool.
Google’s research paper accompanying the project describes Image 3 as “a latent diffusion model that generates high-quality images from text cues,” adding that “Image 3 is the preferred model over other state-of-the-art models at the time of evaluation.” It can be used to create images based on user-input text, with some restrictions on offensive or illegal content, making it a rival to popular alternatives like Midjourney.
The tool was originally launched in May 2024 at the Google I/O event, but at the time it was limited to select users of Google’s Vertex AI. Now, anyone in the US can try it out if they want, suggesting that Google is much more confident in its tool’s ability to create reliable images and avoid some of the problems that have plagued AI image generators for so long.
So far, it seems the reaction to Image 3 has been mixed. Several users have noted that it seems to be much more sensitive to user input than before, censoring words that might not have been blocked in Image 2.
For example, one Reddit user said: “I really have to try harder to achieve what I used to and a random word like “sock” or “water” triggers the censorship filter, which is much more sensitive to benign words.” On the other hand, Image 3 refused to draw innocent-sounding ideas, such as a cyborg or a man crossing his arms. There are positives, though: one of the users mentioned above highlighted its high-quality result and “amazing word recognition and texture.”
How to test Image 3
If you want to try out Image 3, you'll first need to be a US resident to be eligible. If so, you can head over to the Google AI Test Kitchen website and log in with your Google account. Once you've done that, you should be able to start using the new image generation model.
User reports that Image 3 is more restrictive than its predecessor are a useful illustration of the current state of AI-powered image generators. These tools have generated enormous controversy in recent months, and sometimes it seems like not a week goes by without some AI-generated image stirring the Internet's emotions.
The latest culprit has been Elon Musk’s Grok-2 AI. The tool, which is limited to premium users of X (formerly Twitter), has just been updated to its second version and generates images using the open-source software Flux. Users found it had very few limits on what could be created, leading people to draw images of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris piloting a plane on 9/11 or generate clearly copyrighted images without Grok apparently objecting.
With its restrictive outlook on image generation, it seems Google has erred on the side of caution for now with Image 3. Whether that will change as the model is tweaked and refined remains to be seen, but with so many more people now able to access it, we may not have to wait long to see how far its boundaries can be pushed.
