Tech companies try to take AI image generators mainstream with better protections against misuse

Artificial intelligence tools that can conjure whimsical artwork or realistic-looking images from written commands started wowing the public last year. But most people don't actually use them at work or home.

That could change as leading tech companies are competing to mainstream the use of text-to-image generators for a variety of tasks, integrating them into familiar tools such as Microsoft Paint, Adobe Photoshop, YouTube and ChatGPT.

But first, they're trying to convince consumers, business users and government regulators that they've tamed some of the Wild West nature of early AI image-generators with stronger safeguards against copyright theft and troubling content.

A year ago, it was a relatively small group of early adopters and hobbyists playing with cutting-edge image generators such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E.