Generative image AIs and image generation models

Need a new bedtime story for your child? With multimodal models, you can easily create your own picture book. AI helps you bounce ideas back and forth and formulates your story the way you want it. It can transform your quick sketches into high-quality drawings to illustrate your book. And it can give you helpful tips on printing and organisation.  

Example

Monster Princess by Swisscom

Would you like to freshen up your living room – perhaps with a new sofa? A different colour on the walls? If you don't want to or can't imagine it yourself, let AI do it for you. Simply photograph your living room and use AI to try out different furniture, colours or interior design styles – before you spend any money. 

Example

‘Show me the living room in the uploaded image with a sky blue sofa and bright white walls.’

Whether for a birthday, Christmas or wedding, with AI you can generate personalised cards instead of giving off-the-shelf standard cards.

Note: Please remember to protect your personal data and think carefully about whether and which photos of yourself or others you upload to AI (it is best to obtain their consent beforehand).

Example

Create a Christmas card (video above)

Autoregressive models make image editing using AI even easier. Simply upload an image (Note: data protection) and instruct the AI to, for example, remove or replace the background, or remove a specific person from a photo. You can also alter the quality of photos and make yellowed images look as good as new.

Example

“Restore my old family photo.”

How do you explain to your students what life was really like in the Middle Ages? Textbooks can sometimes be dry, and vivid images are not always available. Let AI reconstruct historical scenes and discuss them with your students in class:

Example

‘What did this city look like back then vs. today?’

Microbiological processes occur on a small scale and are usually invisible to the naked eye. However, AI can zoom in very close to a plant cell and make invisible things visible. Conversely, it can also make something unimaginably large tangible, such as what the evolution of humans would look like in fast motion. 

Example

“Convert my uploaded sketch of a cell into a realistic illustration.”

Learning images can be particularly beneficial for visual learners when learning languages, rather than simple word cards. AI illustrates vocabulary and creates appropriate scenes or mnemonics that are easier to remember.  

Examples

‘A happy dog plays in the park.’ / ‘A French family having breakfast.’

Of course, AI can also help teach media literacy, for example by generating AI images and giving them to children to sort together with photographed images.

Example

‘How can real photos be distinguished from AI images?’ / ‘What are some typical AI errors?’ / ‘How can AI-generated content be properly labelled?’ / ‘What does this mean for journalism and the dissemination of news?’

Abstract concepts can be difficult to visualise. AI can help with this by quickly sketching out ideas. It can also assist with mood boards, either by adding images or by creating them directly.  Sometimes AI helps to overcome creative blocks by filling the blank page with an initial idea. This gives you more time to finalise the best idea.

Example

‘Create a mood board for a Scandinavian-style packaging design for organic coffee.’

Constantly generating new content for your company is time-consuming. Let AI help you. A multimodal model supports you in the design phase and helps with initial visualisations. Some companies in the fashion industry are already relying entirely on AI-generated content in large-scale campaigns.    

Example

‘Create a second image variant to perform A/B testing. Use brighter colours and dynamic perspectives for the second image variant.’

Want to make your complex data more visual? Visualisation tools such as Google’s Nano Banana Pro generate complete infographics from a dataset or a description. Microsoft Copilot (with the appropriate permissions) accesses your file storage directly and gathers the necessary information itself.     

Examples

“Visualise our transformation process by analysing the two documents stored [here] and linking them together.”

If you’re an SME or a self-employed person with limited resources, AI can also provide excellent support when creating product photos: photograph your products against a white background and then let the AI transform them into professional-looking lifestyle shots in various settings.    

Examples

“Create product photos for my online shop from four different angles.”