Berlin-based Fabian Stelzer (opens in new tab), who describes himself on Twitter as a'prompt intern' working on three AI-based projects, carried out the image comparison experiment using the text-to-image AI art generators Midjourney, DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion. He entered the same prompts on each tool and used a 1:1 aspect ratio for the resulting images. With prompts ranging from "low poly game asset, Cthulhu monster, 2000 video game, isometric view" to "1990s clip art of a laughing crazy fax machine, windows 3.1, MS-DOS, early computer clip art", the results that Stelzer shared in his Twitter thread allow us to compare how the tools handle different types of requests. Midjourney's creations often feel very dark – almost apocalyptic. After all, this is the tool that was used to create the "last selfie on Earth" images that were going around recently (see our roundup of the weirdest AI art). We think this AI art generator definitely needs counselling, but it also seems to often produce the most natural results when it comes to artistic styles, particularly with textural details. Any artefacts appear natural, whereas in DALL-E 2 artefacts often look like obviously digital glitches. DALL-E 2 has a tendency to throw in random invented words, but it seems to be the best tool for creating photorealistic images and for handling facial expressions. Meanwhile, Stable Diffusion seems to often produce the cleanest results – Stelzer notes that it can create incredible photos too but that you need to be careful not to "overload" the scene.