Google's Bard gets free image generator based on Imagen 2 to compete with ChatGPT

Google adds image generation to its Bard chatbot and makes Gemini Pro available in more than 40 languages to keep pace with competing multimodal chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Google has added a new image generation feature to its Bard chatbot, allowing it to generate images using Google's Imagen 2 text-to-image model - Google's chatbot now has an answer to OpenAI's DALL-E 3. Unlike ChatGPT Plus, which requires a paid subscription, using Bard with Imagen 2 is free. However, as usual with Google, this feature is not available everywhere: the EU, Switzerland, and the UK are excluded for now. In addition, image generation is initially only available to users over the age of 18.

Video: Google

The company is embedding a watermark into the pixels of the photos to indicate that the images were generated by AI. Google has also implemented technical and security safeguards to prevent the generation of images of known people and to restrict violent, offensive, or sexually explicit content.

Bard with Gemini Pro everywhere, Imagen 2 for other Google products and developers

Bard with Gemini Pro is now available in over 40 languages and more than 230 countries, up from 170. According to Google, "Bard will be far more capable at things like understanding, summarising, reasoning, brainstorming, writing and planning." Google has also expanded double-check to 40 languages, allowing users to check Bard's answers using a classic Google search.

Google is also rolling out Imagen 2 for Ads, Duet AI in Workspace, and SGE. Developers can now use Imagen 2 through Google Cloud Vertex AI. Google has also released a new experimental photo tool called ImageFX, powered by Imagen 2. ImageFX is available through Google Labs in the US, New Zealand, Kenya, and Australia.