Use of AI in quiz thumbnails - it will get better

In general, people HATE this.

But things will get better.

The first AI thumbnails were generated with Dall-E 2 in 2022. This was the first decent image generation tool. At the time, no one noticed the AI thumbnails because most people had never seen them.

But Dall-E 2 was honestly very bad. It took like 50 tries to get anything decent.

Dall-E 3 was released in 2023 and was a lot better. You could generally get a useable image after just a few tries. But it had a certain "stink" to it. All the images were super cluttered. We used it for a few quizzes but it got old fast. Here's an example of a Dall-E 3 image.

Dall-E was later merged into GPT 4-o and this version was better yet. For the first time, it could handle text (kind of). But the "stink" remained. Everything has a gross, yellow tint to it. Here's an example.

We also briefly tried using Grok to make images, but gave up quickly. Example.

But things are getting better. Recently, we have been using NanoBanana by Google. I usually start with a normal image and then edit it using the AI. This works much better. And though the AI is still completely stupid if you ask it to do anything complicated, it works. The images don't smell and the thumbnails come out looking great.