Can AI Generate a Product Mockup? We Tested All the Tools to Find Out!

If you’ve not been living under a rock lately, then you’ve heard of AI-generated art. But have you heard of an AI mockup?

The latest wave of visuals generated by artificial intelligence started a few years ago with AI-generated faces.

But this year, we’ve seen some rapid growth with new tools, which can generate entire photos from simple text input, such as Canva’s AI Art Generator.

So far, we know the fantastic artwork AI can do, and one guy even won an art contest with his AI photo…

But as a product mockup generator platform, we were curious, what about an AI mockup generator.

Can these tools put us out of business soon?

How well can AI handle some basic shots instead of fantasy artwork?

We wanted to know, so we tested Dalle, Midjorney, and Stable Diffusion to make mockups for some essential products.

Here are the results:

Midjourney

The first one was Midjourney.

Of course, the output will depend on the input and commands for the Midjourney Bot, but these are the results with some pretty basic words, as we tried to make a t-shirt, mug, iPhone, and cosmetics mockups.

In many cases, a visible Shutterstock watermark was still present on many photos, making it easy to understand where some of the shots are sampled from.

Most of the MidJourney pictures have an artistic painting effect, which is unsuitable for mockups, but with the proper commands, you can create photo-realism too.

Stable Diffusion

Now I’ve got to say; these Stability AI-generated mockup photos already look pretty amazing and photorealistic out of the box.

However, some of the products still clearly have some branding and logos attached to them, highlighting the need for thorough product design research including visual audits and competitive analysis during development. The start of generative AI in product design and development predicts a new era of innovation, offering a myriad of possibilities for creating unique and customized product visuals.

But overall, these photos will already blow away any 3D designer.

If you need more images of humans in various scenes, created with Stable Diffusion, be sure to check out AI Generated People, a collection of super realistic and divers people.

Excellent job Stability; I guess we can send our 3D designer packing?

DALL·E

The DreamStudio of DALL·E can probably create the most advanced and photorealistic results.

Conclusion

While AI-generated mockups may look quite impressive, at the end of the day, these are just AI generated images.

To make an actual mockup, you would also need to upscale the image and place or warp your image on top of the picture in some photo editing tool of your choice…

So to make a quick mockup, we think it’s better to stick with human intelligence and a classic mockup generator for now.

PS: if anyone reading this has generated better results for AI mockups, please share your pictures, and we’ll update this article with your photos!