Back in the olden days of last December, we had to go to specialized websites to have our natural language prompts transformed into generated AI art, but no longer! Google announced Thursday that users who have opted-in for its Search Generative Experience (SGE) will be able to create AI images directly from the standard Search bar.
SGE is Google’s vision for our web searching future. Rather than picking websites from a returned list, the system will synthesize a (reasonably) coherent response to the user’s natural language prompt using the same data that the list’s links led to. Thursday’s updates are a natural expansion of that experience, simply returning generated images (using the company’s Imagen text-to-picture AI) instead of generated text. Users type in a description of what they’re looking for (a Capybara cooking breakfast, in Google’s example) and, within moments, the engine will create four alternatives to pick from and refine further. Users will also be a