Making Mazes with AI - One Year Later
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):
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:
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:
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 !