David Holz, founder and CEO of Midjourney, recently shared the latest progress of the company's current projects during 'Office Hours' on Discord and addressed community user questions. This communication revealed that Midjourney is working on multiple technological innovations to compete in the increasingly intense field of AI image generation. Although the new version has been delayed, it promises richer features. Despite rapid progress in a short time, the frequency of new model releases has noticeably slowed down recently.

The Stepping Star Open Platform Experience Center has launched the image generation model Step-1X, which debuted at the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, alongside the Step-2 language model and Step-1.5V multimodal model. Partnering with Shanghai Film, Step-1X developed an H5 interactive experience based on the classic IP 'Havoc in Heaven', and despite scarce data resources, it can still generate high-quality images. It emphasizes deep semantic alignment and detail generation, utilizes a self-developed DiT model architecture, supports long instruction input, and is suitable for advertising and gaming.

FLUX.1-dev-LoRA is an innovative image generation model that specializes in merging elements of reality with illustrations to create unique visual effects. Trained based on FLUX.1-dev, it can depict foreground characters in an illustrated style while maintaining realism in the background, making it suitable for generating creative images on social platforms. Users can generate images that meet their needs by providing scene descriptions and character action prompts. Official prompt examples demonstrate how to describe for specific art style fusion. Online experience and model download links are provided.

CSGO is a brand new style transfer model developed by the InstantX team in collaboration with Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Beihang University, and Peking University. It aims to enhance image generation technology, particularly emphasizing the combination of content and style. The model supports three modes: 1) Synthesizing styled images from content images and style reference images; 2) Generating corresponding content-style images from style reference images and text prompts; 3) Editing specified objects in images through text. The core of CSGO lies in its unique data construction process, featuring designed data generation and automated cleaning.

The new version of the Playground app significantly enhances the usability and convenience of image editing. Users can easily add, delete, or modify text on posters and adjust their position and style; after uploading images, they can effortlessly remove or add elements through text commands, such as deleting trees or adding new objects. The updated app introduces design requirement categories, including posters, logos, T-shirts, etc., allowing users to choose from templates or create their own designs, greatly increasing design flexibility to meet diverse needs. This update greatly facilitates users in performing detailed image editing tasks.

Freepik's AI image generation model Mystic, in collaboration with Magnific AI, has ushered in a new era of AI creation. This model not only generates ultra-realistic images but also captures intricate details in complex scenes, even generating realistic text within images, achieving full HD quality. The uniqueness of Mystic lies in its integration of the strengths of Stable Diffusion, Flux, and Magnific's proprietary models, finely tuned by a professional team.

Google has announced the reactivation of the character image generation feature for its AI chatbot Gemini, aimed at producing diverse content including photo-realistic landscapes and textured paintings. This feature is powered by Google's AI text-to-image generator Imagen3 and currently supports only English. It will be available to Gemini Advanced, Business, and Enterprise users in the coming days. The newly upgraded Imagen3 model offers improved performance and includes built-in safety measures optimized to avoid historical inaccuracies.

Google DeepMind has released GameNGen, a fully neural network-driven game engine that revolutionizes traditional game image generation methods. GameNGen can generate game visuals in real-time based on player actions, achieving high-quality images that are nearly indistinguishable from reality, with smoothness close to the minimum frame rate perceptible to the human eye. This technology showcases the immense potential of AI in the game development field, which could change game development efficiency, provide personalized experiences, unlock infinite possibilities, and impact game hardware demands and creative approaches.

ByteDance's open-source FLUX Dev's Hyper SD Lora has revolutionized AI drawing speed with its efficient image generation capabilities, shortening the traditional, lengthy process to just 8 or 16 steps. This move not only provides a fast track for creative realization but also establishes a demonstration space on Hugging Face, allowing users to directly experience the drawing effects of the 8-step Lora. Although there is some degradation in image quality, it has minimal impact for most users. Comparison examples show that the degradation is not significant when not enlarged.

Google has launched its latest image generation tool, Imagen 3, which is available to users in the United States through the Vertex platform. This tool can generate more delicate images with better light and shadow effects and fewer artifacts. It is easy to use; users simply input a description to generate images. Imagen 3 has certain restrictions when generating images, such as not being able to create images of public figures, weapons, or specific copyrighted characters, but these limitations can sometimes be bypassed with descriptive language. User feedback indicates that Imagen 3 can generate images similar to well-known characters and brand logos, with impressive results.

Getty Images has partnered with NVIDIA to launch an upgraded AI image generation tool, which boosts the speed to generate 4 images in just 6 seconds, doubling the speed of the previous model. The new model employs the NVIDIA Edify architecture, significantly improving output quality, supporting longer instruction inputs, enhancing image upscaling, and allowing model fine-tuning. The tool introduces an AI image editing feature, enabling users to modify generated AI images and pre-shot creative images, including the addition or alteration of elements and canvas expansion. This feature is now live on iStock and will soon be available on other platforms.

Elon Musk's AI assistant, Grok, has just launched an image generation feature that allows users to create explicit images of figures like Trump, sparking controversy. This feature was developed by Black Forest Labs, a company that recently secured $31 million in investment, including from Andreessen Horowitz. The FLUX.1 AI model, developed by Black Forest Labs, outperforms both Midjourney and OpenAI products in quality. However, this freedom of creation...

Elon Musk's xAI has released the new AI models Grok-2 and Grok-2mini, significantly enhancing reasoning capabilities for generating images and AI-driven features. Grok-2 represents a major upgrade from Grok-1.5, with outstanding performance in chatting, coding, and reasoning. Grok-2mini, on the other hand, is more compact yet powerful. The beta version is now available to Premium and Premium+ users on the X platform. The new features have garnered attention, particularly the image generation capability, which has been used to create images of political figures.

In a pivotal copyright infringement lawsuit, a judge ruled that visual artists' lawsuits against well-known AI image and video generation companies can proceed and enter the discovery phase. The artists accuse these companies of using their works without permission to train AI models, including Midjourney, Runway, Stability AI, and DeviantArt. The crux of the case is whether the AI companies constitute 'induced infringement.' The judge indicated that the allegations are strong enough to warrant further investigation.

Clapper is an AI generation and video editing tool developed independently by an individual developer, integrating various AI technologies including image generation, video creation, and audio. It offers APIs for image, audio, music, and video generation, allowing users to complete the entire process from creative conception to final production on a single platform. Clapper features a timeline function that supports content generation and editing orchestration, providing both a traditional interface and an infinite canvas mode to meet the needs of divergent thinking and precision editing. As an open-source tool, Clapper...

Flux is an AI image generation tool that has recently taken the internet by storm with its incredibly realistic couple photos. These images achieve a shocking level of realism in details, lighting, texture, and hair, maintaining high naturalness and authenticity in any scene. Despite some careful observers noticing minor flaws like missing rings and necklace imperfections, this has not diminished the popularity of the images generated by Flux. Some have even created astonishing works using Flux, CoLing AI, and synclabs.

iFlytek announced a significant upgrade to version 2.0 of its Smart Language tool, bringing revolutionary changes to PPT creation. This intelligent tool, based on the native iFlytek Spark AI application, dramatically enhances the efficiency of presentation creation with its one-click PPT generation feature. The new version has achieved substantial upgrades in three technological aspects: PPT text generation, AI PPT layout creation engine, and AI PPT online editing module, allowing users to create PPTs in a more free, personalized, and professional manner.

A study from the University of California, Berkeley, reveals that large language models significantly decrease the quality of images generated by DALL-E 3 after automatic prompt modifications, with a decline of 58%. Through online experiments comparing DALL-E 2, DALL-E 3, and DALL-E 3 with automatic prompt revisions, it was found that DALL-E 3 outperformed DALL-E 2 in technical capability and adaptability to user prompt strategies. The study noted that DALL-E 3 users achieved better image matching through longer, semantically similar, and more descriptive prompts.

Apple recently launched an innovative image and video generation technology called Matryoshka Diffusion Models (MDM), aptly named the 'Nested Diffusion Model'. MDM employs a groundbreaking approach that processes images at different resolutions simultaneously, achieving seamless generation from low-resolution sketches to high-definition details. The core technical concept is similar to Russian nesting dolls, where each layer contains a smaller but fully functional substructure. The core architecture of this innovative method is referred to as Nested.

OpenAI recently announced that free users of ChatGPT can now generate two images daily using the DALL-E 3 model. This marks the first time DALL-E 3 has been made available to free users. The introduction of this feature simplifies the image creation process through prompts generated by ChatGPT, allowing users to obtain beautiful image designs with simple descriptions. DALL-E 3 was initially rolled out last month for paid users, and this update provides all users with a convenient creative tool.