Google Gemini's Free Version Now Generates Images of People, Closing Gap with Paid Tier

Gemini's Free Version Just Removed a Major Limitation

As one of the most powerful text-to-image AI models, Google's Imagen 3 has been available on Gemini apps, but only to an extent. Generating people was a luxury only afforded to paid users -- until now. You Can Now Generate Images of People Using Gemini's Free App If you use the Gemini web, desktop, or mobile app, you might have played around with its image generation capabilities, made possible through Google's Imagen 3 model. Google released the tool to all users in August 2024, with options ranging from "photorealistic landscapes" to "whimsical claymation scenes," according to the announcement in Google's The Keyword. However, generating images of people was another story. Google limited the roll-out of this specific feature to paid subscribers, including Gemini Advanced, Business, and Enterprise users. If you had a free account, requesting that Gemini produce an image including people garnered the following message: "Generating images of people is only available in early access with Gemini Advanced. Get early access to new Gemini features when you subscribe to Advanced here." Now, as of February 2025, most free Gemini users can successfully generate images involving people on Gemini. That said, if you're still getting an error message, the feature may still be on its way. It seems to be rolling out gradually, starting with US-based users who are using Gemini with English as the chosen language. You still can't produce realistic images of identifiable people or children, per Gemini guidelines. How Does Imagen 3 Perform on Gemini Flash 2.0? Also in February 2025, Google widely released its fastest Gemini model to free users. Google describes the model, called Gemini 2.0 Flash, as a "highly efficient workhorse," which can only mean good things for image generation. Traditionally costing more energy and time compared to standard text generation, AI images can theoretically achieve a higher quality when a more powerful model as the engine. Quality seems particularly important when it comes to depicting people. We all bore witness to early AI-generated humans, from warped hands shrouded in extra appendages to haunted, hollow eyes. So, you can understand my hesitation to trust Google's AI-powered image generator as a free user. Close Contrary to my fears, I was impressed by Gemini's ability to handle my image generation prompts that included people. Particularly considering this service is free, I found the first few image attempts to be premium, realistic, and appropriate to the prompt provided. You can ask Gemini to keep revising an image without having to start from scratch every time. Being able to access Imagen 3 via Gemini for free has certainly been a fun tease, but having to avoid people was a significant limitation. Google's latest update opens up the playing field, and makes Gemini's free service a worthy competitor for paid services like Midjourney. While paid services will have more advanced options, such as custom image sizes, Gemini's approach is easy and ready to use. With so much available for free, I have to wonder if early access is still enough for people to pay for Gemini Advanced.

Google Gemini Can Generate Images of People Again

Starlink's Direct-to-Phone Satellite Tech Is a Bigger Deal Than You Think For a long time, Google's Imagen image generation engine had a big issue compared to competitors such as DALL-E -- it could not properly generate images of people. Now, Google is finally opening up the option to all users again. The free version of its Gemini chatbot is now gaining the ability to create images of people. This move follows the initial rollout of image generation to paying Gemini Advanced subscribers in an "early access" manner. Now, when you ask the chatbot to generate images that contain people, it will not evade your question anymore and will actually generate images with people in it. I played around with it for a bit and found that it still has limitations. For one, it is only good for generating pictures of random people. When you ask it to generate a picture depicting someone identifiable, like a celebrity, it will attempt to generate it but it will ultimately shut down before it is done, telling you that it can't generate images of "identifiable" people just yet. There's an even harder limit on politicians and controversial figures where Gemini will not even try to generate an image in the first place, but that is also in place with most questions related to present-day politics. If your prompt is something like "make an image of a couple skydiving," Gemini will do it -- just don't ask for any specific names. Close For months, the ability to generate images depicting people was a key differentiator for Google's premium Gemini Advanced service. It was launched all the way back in August 2024 as part of the Imagen 3 rollout, and among the many improvements Imagen 3 had, one of them was the model's improved capability to handle queries that contain depictions of people. This feature was later extended to the Gemini side panel within popular Google Workspace applications like Gmail, Docs, and Slides, although you still needed to pay for the premium AI tier. Now, it's slowly but steadily coming to free users as well -- they still had image generation, just not with people, so it's now less limited. As a reminder, Gemini had previously shut down the ability to generate images of people because it had fundamental issues that Google needed to polish before it rolled out. Issues included overly sensitive diversity settings that would essentially randomize the race of people you were generating -- which became a problem when it started creating images like a black George Washington. It could quickly become problematic, so Google opted to just add a hard filter to Gemini that would keep users from generating images with people in it until they sorted things out. It was initially supposed to be just for a few weeks, but it ended up taking months and the release of a brand-new generation model before we saw this again. Google probably underestimated how much work and re-training it would take to fix this. The model still likely needs work, as evidenced by the fact that it still refuses some prompts, specifically those involving identifiable people. But hey, it's better than nothing at all. And the images themselves look pretty crisp and realistic most of the time, too. As of now, the new model is not available everywhere for free users, as Google is probably doing a scaled rollout of the feature to ensure absolutely nothing goes wrong with it. If you want to use it now and skip the line, you'll still have to pay for Gemini Advanced, which would give you access to more stuff, such as experimental models, that you'll find useful if you're a frequent Gemini user. Source: 9to5Google