AI Image Generation Roundup: 18 June 2025

AI image tools are evolving at lightning speed. From mobile creativity suites to in-chat generation and new safety guardrails, here’s a quick roundup of today’s top developments—and what they mean for creators.

1. Adobe Brings Firefly to Your Phone

Adobe has just released a dedicated Firefly app for iOS and Android, packing its own generative-AI models alongside partner engines (OpenAI, Google, Ideogram, Luma AI, Pika, Runway).

Subscribers get unlimited basic generations, with premium-model access available for an extra fee. Firefly on mobile syncs seamlessly with Creative Cloud, so you can start a design on your phone and finish it in Photoshop or Premiere Pro—wherever inspiration strikes.

Adobe emphasizes that all its training data is licensed, aiming to avoid copyright headaches for users.

Source: Routers, Techcrunch 

2. “Imagine” Prompts in WhatsApp

Meta rolled out a free, multilingual “Imagine” command in WhatsApp: just type

imagine <your prompt>

and Meta AI will generate four images right in your chat.

You can then refine any of those with follow-up prompts, making WhatsApp a slick canvas for quick creative experiments.

It’s free, multilingual, and supports iterative refinements—positioning WhatsApp as a lightweight creative canvas on top of its standard messaging features

Source: Opentools, Financialexpress

3. New T2ISafety Benchmark Aims to Curb Toxic or Biased Outputs

Researchers have introduced T2ISafety, the first large-scale safety benchmark for text-to-image models.

It evaluates 12 categories of risk—from hate imagery to privacy leaks—across 70,000 handcrafted prompts and 68,000 annotated generations.

Early results show alarming variation in model behavior, with some diffusion engines still prone to biased or harmful content even after “concept-erasing” filters.

T2ISafety provides the roadmap (and the data) that developers need to build truly safe, production-ready image generators.

Source: arxiv 

4. Indie Puzzle Game Swaps AI Art for Hand-Drawn Illustrations

The Roottrees Are Dead began life as a Global Game Jam prototype with AI-generated visuals.

After winning an itch.io following, developer Jeremy Johnston teamed up with artist Henning Ludvigsen to replace the rough AI art with 40 bespoke illustrations—addressing both quality and ethical concerns.

The Steam-released remaster (January 2025) shows how AI can accelerate prototyping, but human artistry still shines in the final product.

Source: theverge  

What’s Next?

These announcements highlight how AI image tools are becoming more accessible, more integrated, and more responsible—all at once. If you’re a creator or developer, now’s the time to:

• Experiment with Firefly’s mobile workflows.

• Leverage in-app generation in WhatsApp for social media content.

• Audit your models against benchmarks like T2ISafety.

• Balance rapid prototyping with human polish in your projects.

Ready to streamline your prompts? Check out my free blog post: Prompt Templates for Every Occasion