A year ago I did a long series of posts testing out text to image AI and seeing how they did generating mazes based on 10 prompts. Today I wanted to come back a year later and see how the AI image generation has changed. Rather than re-test all 12 websites, I decided to look at the top 4 finishers from last time, and retest them on 3 of the same prompts (I had used 10 prompts last year). Before we get into the comparisons here is a summary of my conclusions from last year:

COMPARISON OF 12 AI GENERATING WEBSITES - WHO DID MAZES THE BEST ?

WHAT I LEARNED USING AI TO MAKE MAZE ART

Here are the 4 top finishers last year:

Prompt 1 - Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel Tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.

In 2023 this was the best image from starryai:

And here are the 4 options this year (Bing allows you to download all 4 options in one photo):

BING

Stable Diffusion

Nightcafe

starryai

Result analysis: We didn’t get any real mazes again but all 4 of Bing’s options are solid and closest. They all look like the Eiffel Tower (same as last year) and I like that the drone level images include appropriate buildings for Paris.

Prompt 2 (#4 LY) - Draw a difficult maze that looks like a drawing of a famous building in sketch style

In 2023 this was the best image from Night Cafe:

And here are the 4 options this year:

Bing

Stable Diffusion

Night Cafe

starryai

Result analysis: Bing and Nightcafe both allow 4 images at once - and that’s great in this instance because those generations are strong and similar to each other. I like them a lot. Stable Diffusion is clean and starryai is interesting. Overall these are really good even if the mazes aren’t solvable

Prompt 3 (#9 LY) - Make a solvable maze that is very large and very difficult to solve because it is so complex

starryai also won this in 2023:

And here are the 4 options this year:

Bing

Nightcafe

Stable Diffusion

starryai

Result analysis: I like what Bing did even if got a bit weird, Night Cafe has nice concepts and Stable Diffusion looks cool. Every starryai option looked 8 bit Nintendo game-ish.

Overall thoughts:

Did AI image generation improve in a year ? Yes, it did. I have been playing around more with them as a result of this blog post and I believe they have, but not evenly. Starryai doesn’t appear to have improved much to me. Bing and Night Cafe made bigger leaps and I especially like Bing for its consistent quality.

Can it make mazes ? Still no. I’m sure it will in the future since there are plenty of websites out there that can do it already. Eventually AI will read these sites and be able to maze makes: A Comparison of the Top 12 Online Maze Generation Websites. Then the new question will be can it make maze art ? and not just a simple maze !

When I started this blog series on AI image generators I said I wanted to answer some questions. After spending a full month using and working with a dozen text to image generators let’s see what I have learned. Here is the original post with the questions, and my added answers:

What do I hope to accomplish ?

See what the competition is. How good is the output.

The output was mixed, with some generators producing intriguing abstract patterns while others struggled with basic maze structures. I did not find any generator who could actually make maze art if only because the current text to image generators can’t make a solvable maze. They can make maze and labyrinth inspired images that are wonderful. They just can’t be solved. I think this will be fixed just like “hands” were fixed.

Become more familiar with what AI image generators are capable of

It seems the standard is to generate 4 images from every prompt text you input, allowing you to pick the best. Many of them also have pre-selectable styles. Each site has a slightly different style and strengths. I found the sites I like to use and those I don’t.

Evaluate and compare the different sites to determine how well they create based on my prompts

As discussed in my previous post there are 4 sites that were better than the rest in my challenge ! Different prompts may mean slightly different results but I imagine the order would not meaningfully change much with new prompts. Some sites just work better than others.

Be inspired (hopefully)

Yes. So many interesting takes on my text prompts (many more terrible ones, but..). I think these sites are a good place to look for inspiration.

Answer: Can I compete with AI generated maze art ?

Right now, they cannot compete with the current quality of maze artists. The odd thing is that a standard program for computer programmers to write is an algorithm to create a maze. There are dozens of sites, many that I have reviewed before to do this. At some point an AI text to image will learn from these sites and I will need to come back to reevaluate this.

And some additional things I learned:

Asking for a famous building means you may not get the full building - usually the top is cut off for some reason. Here is a gallery of the prompt “Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish” from many different sites. I think none of these actually came out as I expected and none of them were able to execute the prompt.

0 - Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel to.png

DeepAI - Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel Tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.jpg

Dream by Wombo -Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.jpg

AIimagegenerator -Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel Tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.png

ToolBaz - Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel Tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.png

Canva - Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.png

Hotpot - Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel Tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.png

DALL·E 2023-01-26 09.41.43 - Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.png

Nightcafe - Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.png

Photosonic - Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel Tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.png

Stable Diffusion - Make a medium difficulty maze of the Eiffel tower in black and white with arrows at the start and finish.jpg

Prompts are often ignored. Expect the AI’s to miss some things. It might be you and a bad prompt…it might be the AI. A few sites allow you to select an image to “start” with as inspiration. So if things aren’t quite what you want, keep manipulating an image until you get it right.
Sometimes you write a bad prompt. If you keep getting bad outputs on multiple websites, the problem is your writing. I would give the example I used for #7 “Make a maze of a slice of an orange in color” didn’t work. My bad.
It's best to approach AI image generation with an open mind, rather than trying to achieve a specific outcome. Better to try a prompt and see what comes out. I cannot tell you how many times I have prompted “make a maze on the surface of the Death Star” because I knew it would be awesome and I have yet to be impressed. Here is one from StarryAI. It looks cool but is not what I wanted because I was expecting a specific look.