Modalities
Text-to-Image
AI that generates new images from a written description — the technology behind tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion.
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In plain English
Text-to-image is a class of generative AI that takes a written prompt and produces an image matching the description. It's one of the most popular consumer AI categories — millions of people use it for art, marketing, design, and entertainment.
Leading text-to-image tools:
- Midjourney — Discord-based, known for artistic quality
- DALL-E — built into ChatGPT
- Stable Diffusion / Flux — open-weight models, run locally or via API
- Adobe Firefly — integrated into Photoshop and Illustrator
- Ideogram — strong at rendering text inside images
How it works: Almost all modern text-to-image tools use diffusion models. Recent advances let users control composition (ControlNet), style (LoRAs), and consistency (reference images) far beyond the original prompt.
Browse this directory's image-generation category for dozens more options.
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Related terms
Diffusion Model
The type of AI model behind most modern image and video generators — it learns to create content by reversing a noising process.
Generative AI
AI systems that create new content — text, images, audio, video, or code — rather than just classifying or predicting from existing data.
Text-to-Video
AI that generates video clips from a text description — the next frontier after text-to-image, with rapidly improving quality.
Computer Vision
AI that can interpret images and video — recognising objects, reading text, detecting faces, or describing scenes.
Multi-modal
An AI model that can understand and work with multiple types of input — text, images, audio, or video — not just text.
Back to glossaryLast reviewed May 2026