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4 min read
Is your organization falling behind with AI?
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In a few short years, artificial intelligence has evolved to a point where it can recognize patterns, draw, and even conjure images.
What began as an obscure experiment is now massively adopted as a mainstream creative force.
AI image generators like DALL·E and Midjourney now captivate the public with convincing visuals at the click of a button, sparking both delight and doubt about the future of art and the creative industry.
AI art may seem like an overnight sensation, but its roots run deep.
An early milestone was Google’s DeepDream in 2015, which produced weird, dream-like visuals and revealed the “mind” of a neural network.1
In 2014, Ian Goodfellow and colleagues developed Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), two dueling neural nets that could learn to create realistic images by training on real photos.2
GANs sparked a wave of AI art in the late 2010s, and a GAN-generated portrait even sold at a Christie’s auction.3
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But the true eruption came with large-scale text-to-image models.
OpenAI’s DALL·E (2021)4 and its successor DALL·E 2 (2022)5 showed that AI could draw anything described in words.
That same year, the open-source Stable Diffusion6 and the independent Midjourney7 put similar capacity into public hands.
Suddenly, anyone could type a phrase and get a custom image in seconds.
From experimental, fuzzy outputs a few years ago, we now have sophisticated AI tools delivering high-resolution art on demand.
With a boom of image generators and wrappers, one challenge is figuring out which model is best for specific tasks.
Enter ImageBattle.ai, a vibe coding project by Philipp Kandal, Grab’s CTO and one of our community members at Swarm.8
This tool lets users directly compare multiple image models side by side using the same prompt.
Kandal created ImageBattle after finding that existing comparison sites gave scores but did not allow easy visual side-by-side judging.
The platform presents a gallery of outputs from different generators for each prompt so you can have Midjourney, DALL·E, Stable Diffusion, and others “battle” for your subjective favor.
Essentially an evolving snapshot of the state of AI art, this tool helps designers, product builders, and creators identify the optimal image generator for their needs.
Let’s look at some successful use cases across various industries.
Global payments network Klarna claimed a $6 million reduction in image production costs, using genAI tools like Midjourney, DALL·E, and Firefly for image generation. They also accelerated their image development cycle from 6 weeks to 7 days.9
The ability to cheaply produce endless variations of product imagery for different brand colors, contexts, or cultures is a game-changer for digital marketing.
In the video game industry, studios similarly use AI for concept art and assets.10
Generators can draft characters or environments much faster than humans, which is a huge time-saver, especially for smaller, independent developers.
Brand marketers and design agencies have embraced AI image generation for rapid content creation.
In 2022, Heinz released a campaign asking AI to “draw ketchup”, and DALL·E 2 produced images of ketchup bottles unmistakably resembling Heinz’s product.11
This stunt went viral and showed how generative AI can be used in branding: in this case, affirming Heinz’s ketchup is so iconic that even a computer knows it.
The best stories are how even solopreneurs and small businesses benefit from these tools.
A solo indie author can use Midjourney to create cover art, and a one-person startup can generate marketing visuals.
AI image generators have democratized visual content creation, letting individuals and small businesses produce graphics that can compete with better-resourced teams.
For bootstrapped creators and entrepreneurs, this newfound capability delivers real ROI in saved cost and time, if not in direct revenue.
If an AI creates a new image that subtly remixes countless copyrighted pieces, is it a new creation or a copyright infringement?
With excitement over AI art comes serious concerns about ethics and authenticity. These image generation models are trained on millions of images scraped from the web, including copyrighted photos and artwork gathered without permission.
Many artists argue that it is theft, and in early 2023, a group of illustrators sued the makers of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, accusing them of unlawfully using protected artwork to train their AI.12
Meanwhile, the U.S. Copyright Office has taken the stance that purely AI-generated images with no human editing cannot be copyrighted, because there is no human creator in the loop.13
AI image generation has advanced so fast that images can be so realistic and easily mistaken for real photos, a problem that bad actors could exploit.
In 2023, an image of the late Pope Francis in a stylish white puffer coat went viral, with many convinced it was a real photo. It was a fabrication made with Midjourney, and commentators called it the first major instance of mass-scale AI image misinformation.14
Similar fake visuals of public figures or events have popped up, sometimes causing panic before being debunked. As the tech improves, doctored images and videos will become harder to spot, potentially fueling propaganda or scams.
As AI models learn from human-made images and text, they can reflect and amplify societal biases present in that data. For example, one study found that an AI tool often portrayed people in stereotyped ways: productive people are male, people cleaning are female.15
This happens not out of malice, but because the models are mimicking the imbalances in their training material.
These developers are working on fixes, such as fine-tuning models or filtering training data, but users of AI images should also stay vigilant against AI unwittingly reinforcing stereotypes and offensive tropes.
Graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, and other people working in the creative industry are watching AI’s rapid progress.
Concerns of creative job displacement are not unfounded: in China, a gaming studio laid off part of its art team and now relies on AI for illustrations (keeping only a few staff to polish the AI outputs).16
Icon, claiming to be the world’s first AI Chief Marketing Officer, plans, creates, and runs thousands of ads per week. It can study ad campaigns from websites, competitors, and customer reviews, and ad account performance.17
The prospect of companies using AI in place of creative humans raises tough questions.
Optimists argue that AI will create new opportunities and that human originality will still stand out. But in the short term, it’s clear that generative AI is already reshaping the creative job market, and professionals and policymakers alike are scrambling to keep up.
As AI continues to affect creative industries, some efforts are being made to guide its responsible use.
In April 2025, OpenAI launched GPT-Image-1, its most advanced image generation model, now accessible through OpenAI’s API.
To support users in using GPT-Image-1 to its fullest potential, OpenAI released a comprehensive Image Generation Guide.18
This guide provides detailed instructions on using the model’s capabilities, including generating diverse styles, adhering to custom guidelines, and accurately rendering text within images.
There are ongoing industry efforts around image provenance, building technologies that tag AI-generated images to verify their origin.
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA)19 and Adobe’s Content Credentials20 embed digital ‘watermarks’ into AI-generated images, helping creators and audiences verify authenticity.
As awareness grows about how AI models are trained on massive datasets—often without artists’ consent—new technologies and initiatives are emerging to protect creative work.
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21222324As an AI-native company, Swarm is excited about generative image tech, but we also set ground rules to use it responsibly.
Here are a few principles we follow aligned with our company values:
These guidelines help our team stay on top of the latest advancements while keeping our focus fixed on what matters most: awesome humans doing impactful work.
Head image by Lennon Villanueva. Mixed media collage using the original Abbey Road album photograph and AI-generated images sourced from public online platforms.
