Everything you need to know before making your first AI image or video — no jargon, no assumed knowledge.
Modern AI can turn a written description — called a prompt — into a picture, a video clip, or even a video with sound. You type something like “a golden retriever surfing a wave at sunset, photo-realistic” and seconds later you have the image. The same idea now works for video (describe a scene, get a moving clip) and audio (describe a song, get music).
There are four basic ways to use this technology, and choosing between them is mostly about money, control, and effort:
| Path | What it means | Cost | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🌐 Website / app | Type on a company's website (Midjourney, ChatGPT, Kling…). They run the AI for you. | Free tiers → ~$10–30/mo | None — just type |
| 🖥️ Your own PC | Download free open-source AI (FLUX, Stable Diffusion, Wan) and run it on a gaming computer with tools like ComfyUI. | Free forever (after owning a GPU) | Setup + learning |
| ☁️ Rented GPU | Rent a powerful cloud computer by the hour (RunPod, Vast.ai) and run the same free tools on it. | ~$0.20–1/hour | Some setup |
| ⚙️ Developer API | For programmers: services like fal.ai and Replicate generate images inside your own app, paying pennies per image. | Pennies per image | Coding required |
If you just want results, use a website. You need nothing but a browser. The big names:
Some of the best AI models are open source — companies release them free for anyone to download. Run them on your own machine and you get:
The catch: you need a reasonably powerful computer, and there's a learning curve.
The key number is VRAM — the memory on your graphics card (GPU). Roughly:
To find your VRAM on Windows: Task Manager → Performance → GPU → “Dedicated GPU memory”.
The software, easiest to hardest:
No gaming PC? Rent one. Services like RunPod and Vast.ai let you borrow a machine with a powerful GPU for roughly $0.20–$1.00 per hour, controlled from your browser. You run the exact same free tools (usually ComfyUI — both services offer one-click templates for it), then shut the machine down and stop paying.
If you're a developer, you don't want a website or a PC — you want a few lines of code. Services like fal.ai and Replicate host hundreds of models behind simple APIs: send a prompt, get an image URL back, pay a fraction of a cent to a few cents per image (video costs more, priced per second). The big labs (OpenAI, Google, Black Forest Labs) also sell direct API access to their models.
| Term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Prompt | The text description you give the AI. Better descriptions → better results. |
| Model | One specific AI “brain” (FLUX, Veo, Kling…). Each has strengths and a style. |
| Open source / open weights | The model is free to download and run yourself. |
| Text-to-image / text-to-video | Type words, get a picture / a clip. |
| Image-to-video | Give a still photo, the AI makes it move. Often better than pure text-to-video. |
| Inpainting | Selecting part of an image and having AI redraw just that part. |
| Upscaling | Enlarging an image/video while adding detail (e.g. Topaz, Krea). |
| LoRA | A small add-on file that teaches a model a specific style, character, or object. |
| VRAM | Your graphics card's memory — decides which models your PC can run. |
| Workflow | In ComfyUI, a saved recipe of connected steps you can share and reuse. |
| Seed | A random number behind each generation — reuse the same seed to reproduce a result. |
| Credits | How most paid websites meter usage — each generation costs some credits. |
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