Best AI for image generation

What 42 creators said they actually use for image generation, from podcasts and YouTube. Not benchmark scores. Updated Oct 18, 2026.

Short answer

For image generation, most creators use ChatGPT (16), then Nano Banana (11).

Top tools for image generation

Creators who use or recommend each
1 ChatGPT 16 creators

"If it would have been 20 minutes of work in Photoshop, now it's, you know, 1 minute of work in ChatGPT or any other tool."

2 Nano Banana 11 creators

"It is still slightly better than the Nano Banana, but this one is a little bit faster, but if you have a Gemini account, this is useful. You'll probably get a ton of credits to use this feature there, and you can edit images, and it's re..."

3 Gemini 10 creators

"I would like to thank Gemini for making me graphics that I would have paid an illustrator $300 for and waited six weeks. I just made that while you were talking, Jenny."

4 Midjourney 8 creators

"I'm mostly Midjourney. Which for me I just have a habit of that — it's comfortable. I actually like the public aspect of the Midjourney Discord where you're seeing what prompts other people were doing and how you could get there, and I l..."

5 Claude 3 creators

"I think I've just been spoiled lately by Opus 5.5. I know, I know. Your GPT girl here has been using Opus 5.5 because for creative tasks, for design, for video, for art, it is just the best on the market right now. I'll do an episode in ..."

6 Grok 2 creators

"Now when I go somewhere, I can basically just send Grok Bot a photo, a screenshot, or literally just the name of the place, and it'll figure out what the place is. It'll look it up through Google Places API and I get the right location a..."

7 Codex 2 creators

"If you wanted to ask ChatGPT for one image, you can now ask Codex for a hundred images and it can just go and do it in a for loop, and it can write a little code for you and do whatever it needs to to get you your answer that's more robu..."

Models creators name for image generation

Nano Banana 12 creators
Midjourney 8 creators
GPT 2 creators

Most creators name the app (like Claude Code), not the model, so these counts are smaller.

Best AI for other jobs

How this works: we read every podcast and YouTube transcript we track and note when a creator says they use or recommend an AI tool for a job. Each creator counts once per tool. Sponsored mentions are left out. More about Followed.