MLA 025 AI Image Generation: Midjourney vs Stable Diffusion, GPT-4o, Imagen & Firefly

The AI image market has split: Midjourney creates the highest quality artistic images but fails at text and precision. For business use, OpenAI's GPT-4o offers the best conversational control, while Adobe Firefly provides the strongest commercial safety from its exclusively licensed training data.

Links

• Notes and resources at ocdevel.com/mlg/mla-25
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The 2025 generative AI image market is defined by a split between two types of tools. "Artists" like Midjourney excel at creating beautiful, high-quality images but lack precise control. "Collaborators" like OpenAI's GPT-4o and Google's Imagen 4 are integrated into language models, excelling at following complex instructions and accurately rendering text. Standing apart are the open-source "Sovereign Toolkit" Stable Diffusion, which offers users total control, and Adobe Firefly, a "Professional's Walled Garden" focused on commercial safety.

The Five Main Platforms

The market is dominated by five platforms with distinct strengths and weaknesses.

Tool Parent Company Core Strength Best For Midjourney v7 Midjourney, Inc. Artistic Aesthetics & Photorealism Fine Art, Concept Design, Stylized Visuals GPT-4o OpenAI Conversational Control & Instruction Following Marketing Materials, UI/UX Mockups, Logos Google Imagen 4 Google Ecosystem Integration & Speed Business Presentations, Educational Content Stable Diffusion 3 Stability AI Ultimate Customization & Control Developers, Power Users, Bespoke Workflows Adobe Firefly Adobe Commercial Safety & Workflow Integration Professional Designers, Agencies, Enterprise Use Platform Analysis

• Midjourney v7: Delivers the best aesthetic and photorealistic quality via a new web UI. Its "Draft Mode" allows for rapid, low-cost ideation. However, it cannot reliably render text, struggles to follow precise instructions (like counting objects), makes all images public on cheaper plans, and strictly prohibits API access or automation.
• GPT-4o: Its strength is conversational refinement within ChatGPT, allowing users to edit images through dialogue (e.g., "change the shirt to red"). It has excellent instruction-following and text-rendering capabilities. Weaknesses include being slower than competitors and generating only one image at a time.
• Google Imagen 4: A practical tool integrated directly into Google Workspace and Gemini. It produces high-quality, high-resolution (2K) photorealistic images quickly and renders text well. Its primary advantage is letting users generate images without leaving their documents or presentations.
• Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3): An open-source model that provides users with total control and privacy. The new SD3 architecture significantly improves prompt understanding and text generation. It can run on consumer hardware, and its quality is free after the initial hardware cost. Its power comes from a vast ecosystem of community tools (see below), but it has a steep learning curve.
• Adobe Firefly: Embedded within Adobe Creative Cloud (e.g., Photoshop's Generative Fill). Its key differentiator is commercial safety; it is trained only on licensed Adobe Stock and public domain content to indemnify users from copyright claims. It excels at editing existing images rather than generating from scratch.

Techniques & Tools

• In-painting/Out-painting: Core editing functions. In-painting modifies a specific area within an image. Out-painting expands an image beyond its original borders.
• Stable Diffusion Power Tools:
  • LoRAs (Low-Rank Adaptations): Small files that apply a specific style, character, or concept to the main model.
  • ControlNet: A framework that uses a reference image (e.g., a sketch or a stick-figure pose) as a "blueprint" to enforce a specific composition or pose.
• Stable Diffusion Interfaces: Users choose a UI to run the model. Automatic1111 is a beginner-friendly, tab-based dashboard. ComfyUI is a more complex but powerful node-based interface for building custom, automated workflows.

Feature Comparison & Exclusion Rules

The choice of tool often depends on a single required feature.

Model Text-in-Image Accuracy Photorealism Quality Complex Prompt Adherence Midjourney v7 Poor. A major weakness. Best-in-Class Fair GPT-4o Excellent. A key strength. Very Good Best-in-Class Google Imagen 4 Excellent Excellent Very Good Stable Diffusion 3 Good to Excellent Good to Excellent Good to Excellent

This leads to several hard rules for choosing a tool:

• If you need accurate in-image text: Exclude Midjourney. Use GPT-4o, Google Imagen 4, or specialist tool Ideogram.
• If you require absolute privacy or must run locally: Stable Diffusion is your only option.
• If you require a guarantee of commercial safety: Adobe Firefly is the most prudent choice.
• If you need to automate generation via an API: Use OpenAI or Google's official APIs. Midjourney bans automation and will close your account.