AI-Generated Images: Midjourney, DALL-E, and Beyond
How image generation models create synthetic visuals, why they are increasingly difficult to distinguish from real photos, and the implications for visual trust.
How AI Image Generation Works
Tools like Midjourney, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion use diffusion models — a class of neural network that learns to create images by reversing a noise process. During training, the model is shown millions of images with captions. It learns to associate textual descriptions with visual patterns. When given a new text prompt, it starts with random noise and iteratively refines it into an image that matches the description.
The quality of these systems has improved at a staggering pace. In 2022, AI-generated images had telltale flaws: mangled hands, inconsistent lighting, nonsensical text in signs. By 2024, Midjourney v6 and DALL-E 3 can produce photorealistic images that fool casual viewers and even some experts. The AI-generated portrait of Pope Francis in a white puffer jacket went viral in March 2023 because millions of people genuinely believed it was a real photograph.