Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generation went from "interesting research" to cultural phenomenon in 18 months. DALL-E 2 (2022) proved diffusion models could produce photorealistic images from text, Stable Diffusion democratized it as open source, and Midjourney v5/v6 set the aesthetic bar that even non-technical users now expect. DALL-E 3 (2023) solved the prompt-following problem by training on highly descriptive captions, Flux pushed open-source quality to near-commercial levels, and Ideogram cracked reliable text rendering in images. The remaining frontiers are compositional generation (multiple objects with specified spatial relationships), consistent character identity across images, and the still-unsolved challenge of reliable hand and finger anatomy.