Over the past two decades, Google’s search engine has undergone numerous updates to bring more benefits and new uses. One of the latest developments was Google’s attempt to integrate generative artificial intelligence into its services, including the search engine. The emergence of technologies like machine learning and deep learning has captured the attention of millions of users worldwide to the immense possibilities of artificial intelligence, enabling it to do many amazing things. Google introduced the Generative AI Search Experience (SGE) in May 2023 to enable the search engine to provide instant responses to any textual queries entered by users, rather than relying on traditional search results. Many updates have been made to this feature, and it now allows the creation of images from simple text inputs on the Google search engine; let’s explain how.
Creating Images Using Google Search
First: What is the Generative AI Search Experience in Google Search?
Google launched the first experimental version of the Generative AI Search Experience (SGE) in May 2023, which was added to its search engine and initially made available to a limited number of users in the United States, then expanded to more countries. We have already provided an initial review of the tool in a topic about Google’s new search engine experience with artificial intelligence, but the tool is still undergoing continuous updates and new features are being added to it.
In general, the generative search experience is an artificially intelligent tool that uses what is known as the large language model to provide answers to queries and search operations conducted by the user directly on the Google search engine results page. The tool also allows for query and search operations in a conversational mode using AI bots, which provide users with suggested modifications to the query phrase to improve search results, and allow them to edit the query phrase without redirecting them to the original query. The tool can also offer users some tips to help improve search results.
Recently, Google has enhanced the capabilities and functions of the tool to allow the search engine to create and generate images based on textual queries or descriptive phrases entered by the user. The generative tool generates up to four images that appear in the search results for each query or request, and users can click on one of the images, then edit the description to add more details to the image and get more accurate results. Many artificial intelligence models dedicated to image creation and generation, such as MidJorney and DALL-E, had preceded Google in this field, but adding this new feature to the Google search engine makes it easier and more accessible to a larger number of users without a doubt.
Second: Creating Images with Artificial Intelligence Using Google Search
The Generative AI Search Experience tool from Google is still only available to users who are at least 18 years old, in a limited number of countries including the United States. Therefore, if you are in any Arab country, you may need to use a VPN application such as ExpressVPN to bypass these geographical restrictions.
To create an image using artificial intelligence through Google Search, you need to activate the Generative AI Search Experience (SGE) feature in Google by opening Google Chrome browser or Google app on your phone or tablet, logging into your Google account, then going to labs.google/sge and clicking on the “Get started” button, then on the next page, activate the SGE feature, generative AI in Search as shown in the attached image above.
You can now start creating artificial intelligence images using the Google search engine. All you need to do is go to the main search engine page. In the search field, type a description of the image you want, but in English. You can start by typing the word “create“, “draw“, or “generate” followed by a description of the image you want to create using artificial intelligence, then press the enter key when you’re done.
Google Search will now display four images created using artificial intelligence based on the textual description you just entered, and you can click on any of the four images to view them in full-screen mode. It’s worth noting that the images do not contain watermarks like other image generators, and the tool will not create images with recognizable faces or realistic faces in any form to avoid ethical concerns.
When you enlarge any image, you can click on the “Edit” button to edit the textual description to change the image or add more details to the image. When you are satisfied with the result, you can download the image to your device or share it via cloud storage services like Google Drive by clicking on the “Export” button and selecting “Download” if you want to download the image to your device, or click on “Google Drive” if you want to save the image on Google Drive’s cloud storage servers.
Images created with Google Search’s artificial intelligence are marked with a watermark as evidence that they are created by artificial intelligence and come with a textual description. Google sets some controls for images that can be obtained using the generative artificial intelligence tool in the Google search engine, for example, it is not allowed to create harmful or misleading images. Currently, the Generative Search Experience tool is only available to users residing in the United States and only responds to queries and requests written in English, but Google is expected to expand the geographical scope of using this feature to include other countries in the near future, and is also expected to add more languages to it.
