ImageFX: this is Google’s new AI that allows you to generate all kinds of images

Google is back with a generative AI. The company’s new tool, called ImageFX, is capable of creating images by simply entering a description of what we want to see, similar to DALL-E 3, Midjourney, and other generative artificial intelligences for images.

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Available on AI Test Kitchen, Google’s web application for experimental AI projects, ImageFX offers a user interface based on instructions that allows you to create and edit images, similar to its competitors. But the peculiarity of ImageFX are the “expressive tabs”: a list of keyword suggestions that allow users to experiment with the “adjacent dimensions” of their creations and ideas.

“Designed for experimentation and creativity, ImageFX allows you to create images with simple text and easily modify them with a new way of using expressive tiles,” says Kristin Yim, product manager at Google Labs, in a blog post.

But its functional features are not everything. Google, aware of the current issues with AI, especially after the recent incidents with artist Taylor Swift, claims to have taken measures to ensure that ImageFX cannot be misused, for example, by adding “technical safeguards” to limit “problematic results” such as violent, offensive, and sexually explicit content.

ImageFX also features a “people with name” filter, a term that surely refers to public figures, although Google has not been very clear about it in their blog post. “We have invested in the security of training data from the beginning,” Google states. “In line with our AI principles, we also conduct extensive adversarial testing and red teaming to identify and mitigate potential harmful and problematic content.”

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As an additional security measure, Google tags images produced with ImageFX with SynthID, a supposedly resistant digital watermark to image editing and cropping. “SynthID watermarks are imperceptible to the human eye, but detectable for identification,” Google continues in the blog post. “Thanks to the information added in ‘About this image’, you will know if an image may have been generated with Google’s AI tools when you find it in Google search or in Chrome.”