Google Adds AI Image Generator to Bard, Rivals ChatGPT

Google has officially announced that an AI image generator will be integrated into Bard after PetaPixel reported it was happening two weeks ago.

Bard is Google’s AI chatbot that is a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. ChatGPT Plus has the latest version of DALL-E available to use for its paying customers.

Google’s Imagen 2 model will be available to customers at no cost at all.

The images generated from Bard will be marked by SynthID, Google’s digital watermark that will indicate that a picture is AI-generated.

“This technology embeds a digital watermark directly into the pixels of an image, making it imperceptible to the human eye, but detectable for identification,” Google explained back in August.

Google says it has carried out “extensive adversarial testing” on its Imagen 2 model for safety issues; the search giant is trying to “limit problematic outputs like violent, offensive or sexually explicit content as well as applying filters to reduce the risk of generating images of named individuals.”

This news marks the first time Google has unleashed its text-to-image model on the public so it will be interesting to see how it is used and if the company’s safety barriers will hold up.

Shutterstock is a customer of Imagen, which it notes is an “ethically sourced AI image generator.” But Google has not disclosed the data it used to train the model nor has it said if creators can opt out if their work is included in the data set.

Imagen 2 coming to Bard was leaked by Dylan Roussel on Twitter (now X). PetaPixel then asked Bard if this was true and the LLM chatbot gave an unnervingly comprehensive answer confirming that an image generator was coming to the service and began to list features.

ImageFX on AI Test Kitchen

Also announced today is yet another Google AI image generator interface called ImageFX which is only available on AI Test Kitchen — Google’s testing platform.

Images generated from ImageFX will also be tagged with SynthID which, according to Google, offers “people more information whenever they encounter our AI-generated images.”

ImageFX will be available for AI Test Kitchen users in the U.S., Kenya, New Zealand, and Australia. It’s only available in English for now.