Before AI chatbots, AI art was taking the internet by storm. You might remember seeing your friends replacing their avatars across social media platforms with AI-generated profile pictures. Well, that was just the tip of the iceberg, as a handful of extremely advanced AI image services have made their debut in recent months. The one to beat is Midjourney, which creates some of the most realistic and impressive images of them all. But there is now a free alternative called BlueWillow that has started to make waves in recent weeks.
As impressive as Midjourney is, you have to pay for a monthly subscription to use it. BlueWillow, on the other hand, offers a paid subscription but runs on a Pay What You Can (PWYC) model. If you can afford to chip in, that’s great, but it’s not required.
Like Midjourney, BlueWillow operates on Discord, but that’s where most of the similarities end. According to the FAQ, BlueWillow “is an aggregator of multiple AI models, including models like Stable Diffusion.” That might explain why it’s both faster and more accurate than many of the other free options you might have tried out in the past.
How to access BlueWillow’s free AI art generator
First, click this invite link to join the Discord server. Next, go to the BlueWillow Discord server, and a pop-up will appear. In that pop-up, you can pick a language, choose which notifications you want to receive, and decide whether or not you want to subscribe.
Once you’re in, make sure to verify your email, then head to one of the “rookie” channels. You’ll notice that other users are making prompts as well. In the chat box, type “/imagine” and then hit the space bar. You can now type any prompt you can dream up. For example, I asked the AI for a “realistic image of tall ruined buildings floating above a chasm in the ground.” After just a few seconds, this was what popped up in the channel:
Admittedly, it wasn’t exactly what I asked for, but the images BlueWillow created are significantly higher quality than anything Bing Image Creator, for instance, has ever produced for me. If you are on the hunt for a new free AI image generator, give BlueWillow a shot.
