Do you remember LimeWire, the file sharing program that everyone downloaded music from in the early 00's? It's back. But not in the way you'd think...
The new LimeWire AI art generator is not from the same company as the old file-sharing LimeWire. The original LimeWire, a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing service, was shut down in 2010 due to legal issues. The LimeWire brand was later acquired by a different company, which is now using the name to launch new products, including the AI art generator. This new company has no direct connection to the original developers of the file-sharing service.
That's right, I said AI art generator. It also has an AI assistant (much like ChatGPT, Gemini, or CoPilot), and text-to-music. You can edit your images as well as upscale and inpaint/outpaint. So, with all these features, how does it compare? I will be focusing here on the AI Art generating aspect since that's my specialty, but later at some point, we will go through the text-to-music and the soon-to-come image-to-music feature.
Upon entering the site, you get several options. If you click "Create Image" it takes you to the screen where you enter your prompt. Once you hit "generate" it takes literally 1 to 2 seconds for your image to appear, depending on the options you choose. I'm used to others like Midjourney and DALL-E, which can take upwards of a minute or two if not even more, to generate an image. So this was a welcome surprise.
You can also use negative prompts to provide a nuance to the images you'd like to generate. Each image costs 2.40 credits if you use certain Stable Diffusion Models, 3.00 credits for Google's Imagen, and about 4.50 for Stable Diffusion Ultra, out of 10 free credits given, but there are packages you can purchase for a subscription fee.
For $9.99 a month you get 2000 images and 400 audios. You get access to all models, and no ads, plus more. From there it goes to $29.00 a month for even more features. This first tier is comparable to the paid amount for the basic Midjourney which provides a limited amount of hours for you to generate at $10.00. It is also cheaper than DALL-E which is $20 with ChatGPT pro. So, I would say this $9.99 is a good deal. Here's why:
The images generate quickly but are fantastic in quality. The prompt adherence is not as good unless using DALL-E 3, (which uses 6.00 credits), but better when you use the prompt adherence slider on some models, and also much better than Midjourney and others. It hardly matters though because you have the ability to tweak your image using some of their features that are available. You can switch aspect ratios or dimensions, and on some models, you can select your prompt adherence values, as mentioned above.
LimeWire's Discord server features daily and weekly contests, with the ability to win LMWR currency, which I have a note pinned to look into more for further details.
I have been testing LimeWire's models, and I will share some of the images below.
All in all, LimeWire is a pleasant surprise. I will be using it a lot more, and hopefully soon will post a review for their audio features, as well! Try it out, I hope you enjoy it.
