About Starry AI

Starry AI, available at StarryAI.com or on their iOS or Android apps, is a powerful image generator. When set to "Detailed" quality it outputs consistently good quality roughly 2k-resolution images.

Besides basic text-to-image generation, Starry AI offers powerful image-to-image functionality, where you can upload an image of your own for reference, or "Remix" an image you just generated. Inpainting (to replace a masked area of the image) is also available. I was able to make a hybrid spider-cat by generating a picture of a furry spider, then inpainting the head and ears area and prompting for the face of a kitten with pointy cat ears. This took several tries to get right, using up my limited number of credits, but it did work in the end.

Starry AI is better at making vertically oriented images than horizontal images. The vertical aspect ratios include a tall 9:16, but there is no 16:9 widescreen available. When using the widest-available 5:3 aspect ratio (which could also be called 15:9), there were repetition artifacts in several of the images I generated.

Images involving nudity are blocked, but the censorship isn't overzealous. For example, when I prompted with the old song lyric, "it was an itsy, bitsy, teenie, weenie, yellow, polka dot bikini that she wore for the first time today," Starry AI did produce an image of a woman in a bikini, instead of blocking the prompt as some big corporate services do in the name of "safety." If you want to generate uncensored images, you should look elsewhere, though.

A choice of several models is available, although some of them produced much lower quality images than the default model. There is also an Enhance mode that significantly improved the quality of some images, especially if they had been generated at a lower quality setting. 

Prompt Adherence in Starry AI is good enough to make many images, but not nearly as good as DALL-E 3. Starry AI got confused in many cases about which adjectives such as colors to apply to which subjects in the scene. Starry AI did pretty well with text, spelling some phrases such as "CANDY SHOP" correctly when prompted to include the words. It seems to be trained on some images that produce pleasing artistic results, but not to as great an extent as Midjourney.

Considering the high price of Starry AI, starting at $4.99 per week for the most basic plan, it is disappointing that the overall image quality wasn't higher than Midjourney version 6. Midjourney also has more features, from supporting outpainting to extend the image in different directions to more ways to use reference images.

Compared to Midjourney, Starry AI has an advantage in being easy to get started with. You can make a few images for free to try it before you subscribe, and it works through an easy-to-use web interface. Midjourney is still testing a new web-based interface, but as of this review still makes new users start by sending prompts through Discord, creating some extra hassles. Midjourney also doesn't have any free trial period, which is unusual among image generation sites.

If you don't mind the high price, give Starry AI a try. You could be making some high-quality images with it in a matter of minutes.