It's a whole new world out there, and while we entertained some early uses of image AIs a year or so ago when there were maybe 3-4 real contenders, the landscape has exploded recently including massive leaps forward in technology. To really cover it all, and even explain the core technology, would require a far larger article than is reasonable, but we can certainly share some of the fun and help you get started too (for free).

Chess is a tricky subject for image AIs for the most part, and even when you tell it you want a queen piece, and it knows this is chess, it is still quite capable of producing a human monarch with a crown on her head.

Not quite what I had asked for

At first I just tried a plain old "Chess Olympiad in Budapest", but the results were downright cooky, so I rejected that almost immediately.

Somehow, this wasn't quite how I imagined a chess olympiad... (the less said the better)

I then asked Dall-E 3 "Illustration of Chess Olympiad in Budapest, Olympic rings" and it started to produce some entertaining and creative results.

The fun thing to realize is that if you enjoyed the results, but would like to see some more samples, you can just tell the AI to try again, and it will spit out some more. 

When you feed a prompt to Dall-E 3 it will give you four results to choose from

I then fed this to Flux, a brand new player in the market, barely out for a month as of this article. It is a powerful AI produced by a German company called Black Forest Labs, and they are the ones behind the new AI running inside Twitter/X called Grok 2. However, while Grok 2 requires a paid subscription to access, Flux was made open source, meaning you can even download and install it on your PC and run it there. 

Flux can be accessed from a variety of sites, but one of them is simple Fluxpro.art. With that exact same prompt, it yielded this:

which is fine, but not exactly inspiring. So what can you do if you feel you may lack that wild creativity to get better results? There are lots of ways to do this, such as consult images by others and see how they did it, which is fine, but suppose you don't want to go through all that and just want the darn image thank you very much. The answer is.... ask the AI! More specifically, ask an AI like ChatGPT or Claude, and just tell them you want a prompt for an image about the 2024 Chess Olympiad in Budapest and would like something fun and creative. Then copy that wall of text (they can be very verbose) and feed it to the AIs and suddenly that same AI is now producing:

That said, the sky is the limit and you can ask for cartoon versions of pieces in athletics clothes ready to vie for an Olympic medal:

and much more!

Using AI yourself

There are a wide variety of amazing resources, almost all of which have some form of subscription plan to allow you to use them in large amounts, but a few things to consider are: 

1. Each image AI is different and will have different strengths and weaknesses. These differences can be quite pronounced, so I encourage you to experiment with them before making the leap.
2. If you don't plan to produce a lot of images, then many of them allow you to generate a limited number of images for free each day. No watermarks or any strange shenanigans either.
3. If you are reasonably tech savvy and have a computer with a modern GPU (video card), then you can consider installing a resource like Flux and remove those restrictions.

The following resources can be used for free for a limited number of times per day, though all require an account with email.

Dalle-E 3

This veteran AI is still an amazing resource and particularly gifted in imitating art styles and illustration-style images

Click here to access Dall-E 3

Ideogram 2.0

Now with its new 2.0 version, it can produce astonishing works that rival a graphic designer for imagery that can be used as a sign even. It is generally regarded as the king of text.

Click here to access Ideogram 2.0

Imagen 3

This is the new AI produced by Deep Mind, the makers of Alpha Zero, and is available for free to US users (or anyone with a VPN). I have found its ability to produce cartoon and comic images to be nothing short of genius.

Click here to access Imagen 3

Flux

As mentioned above, Flux comes in multiple flavors, such as via web with an account for free at Fluxpro.art (and no doubt others) or you can go the techy route and install it locally. One of the virtues of this last choice is that the community behind it is huge and there are many specialized addons, known as LoRA, which you can create or download to teach it to produce images in a special style or topic.

Be warned, it is a fun and fascinating world and not a little addictive, but it can also be both rewarding and productive. For example, I know more than one indie game developer without the means to hire a professional artist who has used AIs to develop assets for their work and realize their dreams.

Links

• Replay Training: a hidden gem in ChessBase
• The Pioneers of Cheating in Chess
• Study shows chess is a powerful tool against dementia
• ChessBase in Minutes: How to annotate like a pro
• The Wonderful World of ereading