This is a list of Generative AI tools recommended by AI Coordinator, Professor Rick Dakan.
"AI" or "artificial intelligence" is used to refer to systems and algorithms that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. AI is frequently associated with Machine Learning (ML), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT).
To view Ringling's Statement on AI and AI Policies, visit this page.
At Ringling College of Art and Design, we acknowledge the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the creative industries. We understand that AI has caused uncertainty, frustration, and even anger among many artists and designers who fear for their livelihoods and the future of their crafts. As we confront the challenges posed by AI, we remain committed to providing our students with the skills, knowledge, and ethical foundation necessary to navigate this rapidly changing landscape.
Text Generation AI
About: ChatGPT is a chatbot and virtual assistant developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022. Based on large language models (LLMs), it enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language.
ChatGPT is built on OpenAI's proprietary series of generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models and is fine-tuned for conversational applications using a combination of supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback.
ChatGPT is credited with starting the AI boom, which has led to ongoing rapid investment in and public attention to the field of artificial intelligence (AI). By January 2023, it had become what was then the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users and contributing to the growth of OpenAI's current valuation of $86 billion.
Who made it? OpenAI was co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman later joining as the CEO. [GeeksForGeeks]
Cost: ChatGPT was released as a freely available research preview, but OpenAI now operates the service on a "freemium" model due to its popularity. Users on its free tier can access GPT-4o and GPT-3.5. The ChatGPT subscriptions "Plus", "Team" and "Enterprise" provide additional features such as DALL-E 3 image generation and increased GPT-4o usage limit.
ClaudeAbout: Claude is a family of large language models developed by Anthropic.The first model was released in March 2023. Claude 3, released in March 2024, can also analyze images. The Claude 3 family includes three state-of-the-art models in ascending order of capability: Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus.
Who made it? Anthropic, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI members Daniela and Dario Amodei created Claude AI.
"Alignment is top of mind for the brother-and-sister duo. In industry lingo, the term means ensuring AI systems are “aligned” with human values. Dario, 40, and Daniela, 36—CEO and president of Anthropic, respectively—believe they are taking a safer and more responsible approach to AI alignment than other companies building cutting-edge AI systems." [Time]
Cost: Limited-use access using Claude 3.5 Sonnet is free of charge, but requires both an e-mail address and a cellphone number. A paid plan is also offered for more usage and access to all Claude 3 models. On May 1, 2024, Anthropic announced the Claude Team plan, its first enterprise offering for Claude, and a Claude iOS app.
GeminiAbout: Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google. Based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name and developed as a direct response to the meteoric rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT, it was launched in a limited capacity in March 2023 before expanding to other countries in May.
Cost: Gemini has a limited free option, or users can opt for Gemini Advanced, which includes integration with Google Workspace and cloud storage with Google One.
As of August 2024, there is campus access to Google Gemini.
MetaAIAbout: Meta AI is an American company owned by Meta (formerly Facebook) that develops artificial intelligence and augmented and artificial reality technologies. Meta AI deems itself an academic research laboratory, focused on generating knowledge for the AI community, and should not be confused with Meta's Applied Machine Learning (AML) team, which focuses on the practical applications of its products.
Cost: As of July 2024, MetaAI is free to use without any paid subscription.
Concerns: Since May 2024, the Meta AI chatbot has summarized news from various outlets without linking directly to original articles, including in Canada, where news links are banned on its platforms. This use of news content without compensation has raised ethical and legal concerns, especially as Meta continues to reduce news visibility on its platforms
CopilotAbout: Microsoft Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Microsoft. Based on a large language model, it was launched in February 2023 as Microsoft's primary replacement for the discontinued Cortana. The service was originally introduced under the name Bing Chat. Copilot utilizes the Microsoft Prometheus model, built upon OpenAI's GPT-4 foundational large language model, which in turn has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
in December 2023, Copilot was added without payment to many Windows 11 installations. Later that month, a standalone Microsoft Copilot app was released.
Microsoft Copilot in Windows supports the use of voice commands. By default, it is accessible via the Windows taskbar. Copilot in Windows can provide information on a website currently being browsed by a user in Microsoft Edge. Copilot can also be used to rewrite and generate text based on user prompts in Microsoft 365 services including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.
Cost: Microsoft operates Copilot on a freemium model. Users on its free tier can access most features, while priority access to newer features, including custom chatbot creation, is provided to paid subscribers under the "Microsoft Copilot Pro" paid subscription service. Several default chatbots are available in the free version of Microsoft Copilot, including the standard Copilot chatbot as well as Microsoft Designer, which is oriented towards using its Image Creator to generate images based on text prompts.
PerplexityAbout: Perplexity AI is an AI chatbot-powered research and conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text. Launched in 2022, Perplexity generates answers using sources from the web and cites links within the text response.
Who made it? Perplexity was founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, engineers with backgrounds in back-end systems, AI and machine learning. Yarats, the CTO, was an AI research scientist at Meta, while Srinivas, the CEO, worked at OpenAI as an AI researcher. Ho, the Chief Strategy Officer, worked as an engineer at Quora, then as a quantitative trader on Wall Street, and Konwinski was among the founding team at Databricks.
Cost: Perplexity works on a "freemium" model; the free product uses the company's standalone large language model (LLM) that incorporates natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, while the paid version Perplexity Pro has access to GPT-4, Claude 3.5, Mistral Large, Llama 3 and an Experimental Perplexity Model.
Concerns: In June 2024, Forbes publicly criticized Perplexity for their use of Forbes' content. According to Forbes, Perplexity published a story which was largely copied from a proprietary Forbes article, without mentioning or prominently citing Forbes. In response, Srinivas said that the feature had some "rough edges" and accepted feedback, but maintained that Perplexity only "aggregates" rather than plagiarizes information.
Separate investigations by the magazine Wired and web developer Robb Knight found that Perplexity does not respect the robots.txt standard, which allows websites to stop web crawlers from scraping content, reportedly despite Perplexity claiming the opposite. Perplexity also lists the IP address ranges and user agent strings of their web crawlers publicly, but according to Wired and Robb Knight, they use undisclosed IP addresses and spoofed user agent strings when ignoring robots.txt.
MistralAbout: Mistral AI is a French company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) products. The company focuses on producing open-source large language models, emphasizing the foundational importance of free and open-source software, and positioning itself as an alternative to proprietary models.
Who made it? Founded in April 2023 by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, the company has quickly risen to prominence in the AI sector. Before co-founding Mistral AI, Arthur Mensch worked at Google DeepMind which is Google's artificial intelligence laboratory, while Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix worked at Meta Platforms.
Cost: Mistral has a variety of "pay-as-you-go" pricing options.
Image Generation AI 
MidjourneyAbout: Midjourney is a generative artificial intelligence program and service created and hosted by the San Francisco–based independent research lab Midjourney, Inc. Midjourney generates images from natural language descriptions, called prompts, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion. It is one of the technologies of the AI boom.
Who made it? The Midjourney team is led by David Holz, who co-founded Leap Motion.
Cost: Midjourney has four subscription tiers. Pay month-to-month or for the entire year for a 20% discount. Each subscription plan includes access to the Midjourney member gallery, the official Discord, general commercial usage terms, and more.
DALL-E 3About: DALL·E, DALL·E 2, and DALL·E 3 are text-to-image models developed by OpenAI using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions known as "prompts".
The first version of DALL-E was announced in January 2021. In the following year, its successor DALL-E 2 was released. DALL·E 3 was released natively into ChatGPT for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise customers in October 2023, with availability via OpenAI's API and "Labs" platform provided in early November. Microsoft implemented the model in Bing's Image Creator tool and plans to implement it into their Designer app.
The Images API provides three methods for interacting with images:
Who made it? Aditya Ramesh, lead researcher and head of the DALL-E team. [The Verge]
Cost: DALL·E can be "pay per image". DALL E 3 is the highest quality model and DALL·E 2 is optimized for lower cost.
Stable DiffusionAbout: Stable Diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022 based on diffusion techniques. The generative artificial intelligence technology is the premier product of Stability AI and is considered part of the ongoing artificial intelligence boom.
It is primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions. However, it can also be applied to other tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, and generating image-to-image translations guided by a text prompt.
Stable Diffusion is a latent diffusion model, a type of deep generative artificial neural network. Its code and model weights have been released publicly, and it can run on most consumer hardware equipped with a modest GPU with at least 4 GB VRAM. This marked a departure from previous proprietary text-to-image models such as DALL-E and Midjourney, which were accessible only via cloud services.
Who made it? Its development involved researchers from the CompVis Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Runway with a computational donation from Stability and training data from non-profit organizations.
Cost: Monthly plans start at $27/month, access to 100+ AI APIs and models.
Leonardo.AIAbout: Leonardo.Ai is an AI-powered platform specializing in image generation and manipulation. They combine generative AI technology with unparalleled creator control, reinforcing human creativity instead of replacing it.
The company platform emphasizes granular control in every step of the content generation process. Leveraging a slew of cutting-edge backend features, Leonardo excels in model fine-tuning, prompt adherence, training speed, inference pace, and multi-image prompting capabilities. They address common obstacles such as image degradation and have introduced custom upscaling, all with commitment to continuous improvement and expansion.
Who made it? Sydney, Australia-based CEO and co-founder J.J. Fiasson became interested in generative AI when Google Deep Dream launched, and continued to explore generative AI at his last startup, gaming studio Raini Studios. As of July 2024, Canva has acquired Leonardo.ai, as the company looks to broaden the scope of its AI tech stack. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams said it’s a mix of cash and stock. All of Leonardo.ai’s 120 employees will be joining Canva, including the executive team.
Cost: Leonardo offers a free tier that includes a daily quota of tokens. These can be used for your creative projects within our platform. This free offering doesn’t come with an expiry date, so you can use it for as long as you like. Our paid subscriptions come with extra benefits: an increased token allowance, faster image generation, and access to premium features.
Google Imagen in Vertex AIAbout: Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model with an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding, Imagen is an AI system that creates photorealistic images from input text. Imagen builds on the power of large transformer language models in understanding text and hinges on the strength of diffusion models in high-fidelity image generation.
With Imagen, you can do the following:
Cost: A free trial is available, and cost is based on image input, character input, or custom training. You can estimate costs via Google Cloud's pricing calculator.
[Google]
MetaAIAbout: You can generate custom images using Meta AI. When you begin typing a prompt, you'll see an example image. When you submit the prompt, Meta AI will generate four images based on it including the example image. You can download the generated images, regenerate images based on the same prompt, or submit a new prompt. As of July 2024, the feature is currently in beta.
Note: To generate images on www.meta.ai you must log in with your Facebook or Instagram account. If you don't log in, you can still chat with Meta AI.
To generate images with Meta AI:
Cost: free with Meta account (Facebook or Instagram).
[Meta]
FireflyAbout: Adobe Firefly is a generative machine learning model included as part of Adobe Creative Cloud. It is currently available to all Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers.
Adobe Firefly is developed using Adobe's Sensei platform. Firefly is trained with images from Creative Commons, Wikimedia and Flickr Commons as well as 300 million images and videos in Adobe Stock and the public domain. It uses image data sets to generate various designs.It learns from user feedback by adjusting its designs.
Cost: Generative credits that allow the use of generative AI features powered by Firefly are given to Adobe Creative Cloud users. The consumption of generative credits depends on the generated output's computational cost and the value of the generative AI feature used. Learn about when the credits renew.
Video Generation AI 
GenmoAbout: Genmo's most recent product is Replay, a new, high-quality AI video generator available to the public for free. Replay is available at https://genmo.ai with an easy to use and fast interface.
Who made it? Genmo was started by two ex-Googlers and academics, including one of the co-authors of the DDPM paper.
Key Features of Genmo.AI:
Cost: Genmo is 100% free to use under the CC BY-NC 4.0 terms. Your generations will come with a watermark, which can be removed by upgrading to Turbo. Genmo Turbo costs $10 per month.
[Genmo]
PikaAbout: Pika 1.0 allows users to generate and edit videos in diverse styles such as 3D animation, anime or cinematic – from simple text prompts.
Who made it? In April 2023, Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng dropped out of Stanford to launch Pika to build an easier-to-use AI video generator.
Cost: Pika AI offers four main pricing tiers: Free Basic, Standard, Unlimited, and Pro, each designed to cater to different user needs and preferences. The Free Basic plan includes 250 initial credits with daily refills to 30 credits, the ability to download videos, and Lip Sync audio generations at a cost of 2 credits each. The Standard Plan is priced at $8 per month, and offers 700 monthly credits, free Lip Sync audio generations, video downloads, upscale resolution, extended video lengths, and the option to purchase more credits at a discount, without watermarks. The Unlimited Plan costs $28 per month. The Pro Plan, priced at $58 per month (yearly billed as $696), provides unlimited Lightning generations, infinite credits, early feature access, commercial terms, and more, tailored for professional use.
KaiberAbout: Kaiber is an AI creative lab made up of Kaiber Studio and the Kaiber App.
The Kaiber App is a creative platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate videos and images based on user inputs. You can provide text inputs, which are known as "Prompts," to generate unique assets from scratch. Or you can upload your own images, music, videos, and other content to incorporate into your creations. As part of Kaiber's video generation process, they present "Preview Frames" to give you a sense of what your video will look like.
Who made it? Eric Gao, aka oksami, is Kaiber's co-founder and CTO. His journey from music producer and computer engineer to tech entrepreneur has shaped Kaiber into what it is today.
Cost: Kaiber's basic tier starts at $5/month. They have a 7 day free trial period, and a Pro ($10/month) and Artist($25/month) tier for access to additional features and credits.
[Kaiber]
InvideoAbout: Invideo's intuitive, AI-powered platform lets you transform any text prompt into a complete, publish-ready video. It effortlessly handles script generation, visual matching, subtitles, voiceovers, and background music, allowing you to create professional-quality videos with zero prior video creation skills.
Beyond simple translation, you can prompt and create content directly in your preferred language or translate your projects into over 50 languages using simple text commands. Additionally, personalize your videos further with AI voice cloning to make your videos sound exactly like you, saving hours of recording time.
The San Francisco-headquartered company bills itself as the easiest way for anyone to create professional-quality videos, using a drag-and-drop interface along with a library of templates and stock photos and videos. The resulting videos can then be optimized for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms. [TechCrunch]
Who made it? Sanket Shah is the founder and CEO of InVideo.io. In 2022, Anshul Khandelwal joined InVideo as co-founder and CTO.
Cost: Free trial available (10 mins/wk of AI generation), $20/month for Plu(50 mins/mo of AI generation with 80/mo iStock, 100 GB storage, Unlimited exports, and 2 voice clones), and $48 for Max (200 mins/mo of AI generation, 320/mo iStock, 400 GB storage, Unlimited exports, and 5 voice clones).
RunwayAbout: Runway's Gen-3 Alpha is the first of the next generation of foundation models trained by Runway on a new infrastructure built for large-scale multimodal training. It is a major improvement in fidelity, consistency, and motion over Gen-2, and a step towards building General World Models. Despite facing controversy — as many AI model providers have lately — over its data scraping and training practices, the New York City-based startup Runway is plowing ahead with new marquee features for its realistic generative AI video platform.
Trained jointly on videos and images, Gen-3 Alpha will power Runway's Text to Video, Image to Video, and Text to Image tools, existing control modes such as Motion Brush, Advanced Camera Controls, Director Mode as well as upcoming tools for more fine-grained control over structure, style, and motion.
Who made it? Runway was founded in 2018 by Cris Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala and Anastasis Germanidis. Valenzuela met Matamala and Germanidis while in art school at NYU, where the trio came to realize that they shared a curiosity in AI’s creative potential. From there, Valenzuela, Matamala and Germanidis started building a suite of AI-powered tools geared toward moviemakers, cinematographers and photographers. [TechCrunch]
Safety measures in place: The model automatically attempts to detect and block the creation of video from explicit still imagery or well-known figures such as politicians.
Runway is among several AI companies currently being sued in class action lawsuits by creators who allege that the general practice of AI companies scraping and training on publicly posted material — including copyrighted material — without express permission, authorization, compensation, or consent is a violation of copyright law.
Cost: There is a free "basic" option that comes with 125 one-time credits, and other tiers include Standard ($12/month), Pro ($28/month), and Unlimited ($76/month). A 10-second generated video requires 40 credits through Runway’s pay-to-play and subscription tiers, while a 5-second generation costs 20 credits.
Audio Generation AI 
ElevenLabsAbout: ElevenLabs is an AI audio research and deployment company with the mission is to make content universally accessible in any language and any voice. Their research team develops AI audio models that generate realistic, versatile and contextually-aware speech, voices, and sound effects across 32 languages.
The technology is used to voice audiobooks and news articles, animate video game characters, help in film pre-production, localize media in entertainment, create dynamic audio content for social media and advertising, and train medical professionals. According to the company, ElevenLabs has also given back voices to those who have lost them and helped individuals with accessibility needs in their daily lives. "We develop our tools mindful of their impact. AI voices offer a preview into the future of digital interaction and making them safe is our priority. Our goal is to ensure that our products are developed, deployed, and used safely while continuing to drive positive and creative applications."
Cost: You can use ElevenLabs for free and have access to 10k Characters/mo (~10 mins audio). With the free version, you can generate speech in 32 languages using thousands of unique voices, translate content with automatic dubbing, create custom, synthetic voices, generate sound effects, and have API access. You also have the option to subscribe at various levels with increasing services provided at each level.
UdioAbout: Udio is a generative artificial intelligence model that produces music based on simple text prompts. It can generate vocals and instrumentation. Its free beta version was released publicly on April 10, 2024. Users can pay to subscribe monthly or annually to unlock more capabilities such as audio inpainting.
"Udio works like an AI art generator. You can either specify a prompt and let Udio do all the heavy lifting, from music to lyrics, or get as detailed as you want. Did I mention that there are lyrics? And vocals? Yes, Udio will even sing the lyrics for you, in voices that sound incredibly realistic and even emotional. Each “song” is generated as a 30-second clip, but you have the option of extending it with extra time, and even intros and outros. The maximum length of the song is short, though: about 90 seconds, Udio says. [...]
A song can be “remixed,” in that you can try an entirely new approach or keep the same lyrics and let Udio’s AI tweak it for you. But there’s an odd quirk, too: at a certain point a song may be too long to “remix” but not too long to extend. It just means that you’ll end up with multiple extended songs as you try and figure out what works.
Unlike some AI art generators, Udio seems at least vaguely aware of copyright; you can’t ask it to sing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” (or any song, actually) in the vocals of Taylor Swift. But there doesn’t seem to be any prohibition against taking the “My Way” lyrics and writing a drum-and-bass song around them, if you want." [PC World]
Who made it? Founded in December 2023 by a team of former researchers for Google DeepMind headed by Udio's CEO, David Ding, the program received financial backing from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and musicians will.i.am and Common, among others. Critics praised its ability to create realistic-sounding vocals while others raised concerns over the possibility that its training data contained copyrighted music.
Cost: Free, Standard, or Pro versions available for subscription.
SunoAbout: Suno AI, or simply Suno, is a generative artificial intelligence music creation program designed to generate realistic songs that combine vocals and instrumentation, or are purely instrumental. Suno has been widely available since December 20, 2023, after the launch of a web application and a partnership with Microsoft, which included Suno as a plugin in Microsoft Copilot. The program operates by producing songs based on text prompts provided by users. Suno does not disclose the dataset used to train its artificial intelligence but claims it has been safeguarded against plagiarism and copyright concerns.
Who made it? Suno was created by a team of musicians and artificial intelligence experts based in Cambridge, MA (Michael Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho, and Keenan Freyberg). They are proud alumni of pioneering tech companies like Meta, TikTok and Kensho, where their founding team worked together before starting Suno. [Suno]
As of July 2024, Suno released an iOS version of its app. In doing so, Suno arguably made it easier than ever for regular folks to whip up music on the fly.
In June 2024, a lawsuit, led by the Recording Industry Association of America, was filed against Suno and Udio alleging widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings. They argue that the company’s tool can only generate tunes because it chewed on untold numbers of their copyrighted songs to learn how. (Suno, for its part, has said its technology is “transformative.”) The lawsuit sought to bar the companies from training on copyrighted music, as well as damages of up to $150,000 per work from infringements that have already taken place.