DALL-E 2 was recently released to the public, but it is not the only game in town with competition from the open source Stable Diffusion as well as the Discord powered Midjourney. All 3 services provide AI powered and deep learning based text to image generation capabilities although each is quite different in it’s approach.
Launched the end of September to everyone (in supported countries) by OpenAI, DALL-E 2 is perhaps the easiest to get started with simply head on over to their website and sign up. You will need to confirm your phone number via SMS as part of the sign-up process, which may be a deal breaker for some. You get 50 credits a month free, with 15 additional credits each month thereafter, with more credits purchasable.
Stable Diffusion is the most complicated, but also the most flexible (and potentially free) option on the list. Stable Diffusion is an open source project and you can run it on your own machine if you have time and a beefy GPU. However if you prefer an approach more similar to the credit based website approach of DALL-E 2, you can use the beta version of DreamStudio. You get a number of free trial credits to start and more can be purchased. Being an open source project with a large community behind it, there are a number of different options for working with Stable Diffusion nicely summarized in this guide.
Midjourney is another option, this one is based on the Discord platform. Users are given a number of free credits to try things out with more available for purchase. You access Midjourney by following them on Discord, joining the appropriate channel then sending them a series of slash commands. The manual is available here.
In the video below we check out DALL-E 2 vs Midjourney vs Stable Diffusion (DreamStudio) by sending the same 5 requests to each service.