The featured image above is generated using one of the recommended AI anime art generators in this post. Venture a wild guess?
As anime buffs, our passion for drawing and creating unique, original, high-quality, and impressive anime images is no less than streaming anime. Back in the day, it was only possible with drawing apps, but now with the help of artificial intelligence, creating your own anime girls and boys has never been easier.
On this page, you’ll find the best AI-powered websites and apps to create AI anime art and images, and many of them are free to use.
Also Read: Just like AI art, AI-generated music is also insanely good, learn about the best AI music generators for more!
Pro Tip: When used with proper prompts, most AI art generator tools based on modern generative models like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, Midjourney’s custom model, etc. are competent for creating high-quality and realistic anime images. Learn more on our list of the best AI art generators.
Content Table
- Comparison table of the best AI anime art generators
- Reviewing the top anime AI art generators
- FAQs on generating anime using AI
Best AI Anime Art Generators Compared
| Anime AI | Verdict | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| niji・journey | The anime-specific mode of Midjourney with tailored algorithm | $10/month |
| Midjourney | The industry’s flagship AI image generator that creates quality anime pics | $10/month |
| Artbreeder | Easily create beautiful anime portraits and characters without text prompts | Freemium |
| PixAI.Art | A highly-recommended anime creation and sharing platform with a credit system | Free |
| Waifu Labs V2 | The DAN-based AI art generator for creating anime girls and boys | Freemium |
| Waifu Diffusion | A Stable-Diffusion-based model trained with anime images on Danbooru | Free and open-source |
| Holara | Randomly generate anime characters on the base model and fuse characters into one | Free |
| Anything V5 | Anything models generate high-definition anime images after local installations | Free and open-source |
| ERNIE-ViLG | ERNIE-ViLG generates anime images from Chinese and English text prompts | Free and open-source |
| Dezgo | Dezgo gathers a selection of SD models in one place, providing both online and offline generations | Free |
| ZMO.AI | It’s impressive that ZMO.AI offers a dozen of anime styles from new and classic anime titles | Freemium |
| Crypko | Randomly generate anime characters on base model and fuse characters into one | Freemium |
| NovelAI | The subscription-based AI anime image generator best for existing anime characters | $10/month |
| PicSo | Picso is a paid tool that is good at creating realistic style real girl images and anime girl images | $9.99/month |
| Neural Love | An AI website to create and enhance anime images and restyle your photos to anime | Freemium |
| Soulgen | Soulgen requires a subscription to generate anime girls and unblur the output | $9.99/month |
| fantoons.xyz | Create images in the anime, comic, and cartoon styles based on Harry Potter characters | Free |
Top AI Anime Art Generators Reviewed
niji・journey
Niji Journey (also known as にじジャーニー in Japanese), is called the Midjourney Niji Mode, it is the anime-specific version of the state-of-the-art AI image generator Midjourney. Niji Journey is partnered with Spellbrush which is the subsidiary of WaifuLabs, and it’s based on the diffusion model GAN model, but with a few tweaks. Its anime art generations are insane.
In a bid to use Niji mode in Midjourney, go to the settings panel and set Niji mode as the default algorithm, or simply add the Niji parameter at the end of the prompt (also with “anime style” for the best results). As of the writing of this post, the anticipated Niji 5 model is just rolling out, bringing the new Niji 5 Stylization Scale feature.
Midjourney
Even if you don’t go with the Midjourney Niji Mode, the Midjourney itself is more than competent for creating realistic anime art images without a glitch. Midjourney V5, working with the new --testp option, is exceptionally good at generating anime-style images. However, now the paid subscription that costs $8 ~ 10/month is a bit of trouble, yet you can easily opt for free Midjourney alternatives to solve that.
Using tested prompts from featured community artworks or prompt websites like PromptHero or PromptBase helps you generate anime images in Midjourney with ease, but remember to add the Midjourney bot to a private server to avoid crowdedness.
Artbreeder
If you’re looking to make anime profile images, Artbreeder is your go-to. The Artbreeder splicer tool allows you to create gorgeous anime avatars from your own images with the Anime Portraits feature. On the other hand, you can also create by “remixing” the artworks of others in an intuitive way.
The way Artbreeder works is different from most other AI art creator tools, it doesn’t involve the use of text prompts, you spend most of the time picking the base image and fine-tuning the results using various given options.
To make your own anime characters on Artbreeder, refer to our earlier guide on how to use Artbreeder.
PixAI.Art
PixAI.Art is a well-designed website for creating and sharing first-rate anime AI art images for free. Here you can freely download images posted by other users (without logging in) for sharing outside of PixAI or personal uses, but commercial uses are usually prohibited.
In order to generate anime images or create comics, you need to sign up for an account. The generation process is straightforward, you only need to select a model and input text prompts. The only downside for the website is the limited credits that only refill by day.
Looking for inspiration from the community? With anime and video game categories like Genshin Impact, Blue Archive, and Fate Series, you can easily find your favorite anime characters such as Raiden Mei, Hasumi, and Saber.
Waifu Labs V2
waifulabs.com, created by Sizigi Studios, is a service that lets you create your ideal anime waifu using AI. After drawing a 20-millionth commission, Waifulabs welcomes its new Waifu Labs v2 Model.
Waifu Labs 2 is powered by an AI called Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), using 2 AIs respectively called Generator and Discriminator to train one another. A full-blown GAN model is able to create art without human guidance.
In Waifu Labs V2, you’ll need to select a waifu from a range of cute base options, choose a color palette, and decide on details such as hairstyle, clothing, and pose. The customization options are a bit limited like you can’t pick Stage 4/Pose and get back to the color palette.
Go to the Waifu Labs V2 Website
Waifu Diffusion
Waifu-diffusion by hakurei, available on both Google Colab as well as the AI community Hugging Face, is a Stable-Diffusion-based model that generates attractive anime images from text prompts. It is trained with images from Danbooru.
Given its open-source nature, Waifu Diffusion has been extremely popular since its release. As of this writing, the download amount last month on Hugging Face reached 310 thousand. However, note that the OpenRAIL-M license further specifies the rights and usage for Waifu Diffusion.
You can install the latest Waifu Diffusion 1.5 on your computer, train it with anime images using Dream Booth and Novel AI, and eventually generate realistic anime images.
See Waifu Diffusion on Hugging Face
Holara
Holara, on the basis of the Stable Diffusion version 1.5 base model, is another SD AI that is trained on Danbooru images and tags. Holara is a relatively new and beginner-friendly model that provides different scales, steps, seeds, and quality tags to generate anime images.
Additionally, with the addition of hidden tags into prompts, users get to modify seed quality tags and eventually improve the quality of generated anime. Compared with the previously introduced NovelAI, Holara prevails in terms of the quality of the output, but not so much when it comes to customizability.
There’s also an image-to-image feature to recreate anime images from other AI models and regenerate images to two variations with a Strength of 75.
Anything V5
Anything is another Stable Diffusion model that is used to generate high-definition anime images. It now has various stable versions: V1, V2.1, V3, and V5, while Anything V5 is currently the latest model, and Anything V3 is a popular version.
The Anything V5 and Anything V3 models are both recommended, if you’re looking for more precise controls using tags, go with Anything V5, and if the image quality matters the most to you, go with Anything V3. Additionally, Anything V5 works better with Lora.
For creating anime art of satisfactory quality, Anything V5 requires a minimum of 8GB of VRAM and the program will take up 20GB of storage on your device. You can also try Anything V3 and Anything V4.5 for different types of outputs.
Anything V5 by the developer of Anything V3 yuno779 is currently only published on Civitai.
ERNIE-ViLG
ERNIE-ViLG by Baidu is a Chinese text-to-image AI model that offers a unique feature of selecting styles for output images. According to data from MS-COCO, ERNIE-ViLG even surpassed peer models like DALL-E regarding Fréchet inception distance (FID).
The ERNIE-ViLG model can be implemented using Python code without downloading the pre-trained model. Local input only comprises textual data, with all calculations completed in the background. Returned images can be accessed and viewed via a browser. This new AI from China is indeed another surprise other than the rise of Chinese movies and Chinese anime.
Now you can even try ERNIE-ViLG 2,0 Demo on the web, and the anime outputs are impressive.
See ERNIE-ViLG on Hugging Face
Dezgo
Dezgo is the gathering of a selection of Stable-Diffusion-based AI image generator models including Anything 3.0 (anime), Anything 4.0 (anime), Anything 5.0 (anime), Epic diffusion 1.1 (general), Stable Diffusion 1.4 (general), Stable Diffusion 1.5 (general), Stable Diffusion 2.1 (512px) (general), Vintedois Diffusion (simple, general), Waifu Diffusion 1.3 (anime), and Waifu Diffusion 1.4 (anime), while two of them have already appeared their names in the content above.
As you can see, there are plenty of options for you to make anime and waifu images, and with the Resolution, Negative prompt, Guidance, Sampler, Seed, Steps, and Upscale options, the quality of results is guaranteed.
With these many models, you can easily create artwork in styles of anime, cartoons, and photorealism. Note that the options are only available in the Power Mode, which, however, relies on the local running.
ZMO.AI
ZMO.AI is yet another impressive AI anime generator that even provides plenty of selectable anime styles originating from different anime titles.
The Anime category is free, and there are a dozen of unique and useful anime styles to tailor the output to the way you want, such as Anime Vivacit, Japanese Anime, Anime Drawing, Anime Art, Fairy Girl, Anime Classic, Gorgeous Girl, Bright Girl, Makoto Shinkai, Miyazaki, and Ukiyo-e.
Apart from that, as we can see from the Community Showcase section, ZMO.AI’s competence in generating realistic photos is also applaudable.
You’ll be asked to register for an account or log in with Google when generating anime pictures, and free users can produce 2 images at a time, at 640px resolution.
Crypko
Crypto is very easy to use, even for the most inexperienced users. All you need to do is to select a preferred model, hit generate, and hit Save to keep the satisfying results from the randomly generated anime characters. No further customizations and adjustments are needed.
The saved characters are called Crypkos, you can then edit them or fuse two Crypkos from the same model into one (which is similar to Artbreeder). The other editing options Attributes, Variation, and Video, on the other end of the spectrum, requires a paid plan.
There are male and female base characters for you to create anime boys and girls. And to get started, you’ll need to sign up for an account, even if you choose to log in with Google.
NovelAI
NovelAI is a subscription-based AI story-writing tool and it also has a text-to-image AI generator model that is great for creating anime images, and is one of the not many AI art creators that generate NSFW images. NovelAI works best when you’re trying to create already existing and popular anime characters on the internet.
You can start with a Free Trial and what you will be looking for is the Image Generation feature, to use this feature, you need to sign up for an account with your email address.
For the best output anime art, you need to take time fine-tuning the settings: use the Scale value to refine the effects, use Brackets to strengthen or weaken individual tags, or use Advanced Sampling to change the outcome.
Go to the Novel AI Image Generator
PicSo
PicSo is an AI tool that generates AI art and AI girls from text prompts, and it has presets for creating images of anime girls. The PicSo website also has a Face Swap feature for you to make deepfake videos.
Just like many other AI anime generators, you need the text prompts to get started, and PicSo also uses a collection of presets to further define the output images, they include Action, Body, Clothing, Hair, Face, Scene, Accessories, and View. And you can then download, recreate with, or publish the output anime girl images.
Compared with the abovementioned Stable Diffusion based models, PicSo is quite restrained when we try to generate images of various styles instead of girls showing their bodies.
Neural Love
Neural Love is another free-to-use anime AI art generator and image restyler website. What makes Neural Love special is that it also offers AI image/video enhancements and content synthesis with which you can improve your generated anime artwork.
The overall output quality is up-to-par, and for getting the HD mode and Private generation, neural.love requires payment for more credits and a monthly subscription, which means it’s not completely free. Meanwhile, there were occasional non-responding issues while we use the website.
In order to generate AI images, you need to sign up for an account or log in using Facebook or Google accounts. And according to our testing, NSFW prompts are banned due to their ToS.
Soulgen
Here comes another good tool, Soulgen, an AI girl generator website that makes your dream girls come to reality. The free trial allows you to generate one image at a time and there are advertisements. Various styles are provided for you to create anime girls and real girls of different kinds.
Speaking of real girls, Soulgen is capable of creating hyper-realistic style girl images as if they are footage taken in real life, it’s a solid option if you are looking for full-body pictures instead of profile pictures. Your created artworks on Soulgen are completely unique and not copyrighted, and they can be used for commercial purposes.
Please note that the domain name of Soulgen has been recently switched to soulgen.ai to soulgen.net.
fantoons.xyz
fantoons.xyz allows you to create fanart models with captions online for free, just like comic books. It has a specific anime style to make your comic in Japanese manga style, making it another unique AI anime art creator tool. The base characters are from the Harry Potter franchise, but you can easily add a touch of anime to them and see what you get.
There are plenty of anime/cartoon/and comic-related styles for you, such as anime, Pixar, photorealistic, comic book, manhwa, etc., so it’s also perfect for those who love watching cartoons.
Go to the fantoons.xyz Website
FAQs
Is AI good at generating anime images?
As a matter of fact, AI is quite good at generating anime images, the overall performance of our top-ranking AI anime art generators is quite impressive, you can have a glance at some of the outputs from the screenshots in this list.
Can I use the AI anime art generator for commercial purposes?
Most AI-generated anime images are uncopyrighted, but whether you can use the output images for commercial purposes is subject highly to the license of the base anime AI art generator model.
What is Danbooru?
Danbooru is an Anime Image Board website hosting millions of anime pictures categorized by tags. Many anime AI art generators have been trained with Danbooru images and tags to create good-looking and realistic anime images.
What is the best AI art generator for anime?
Some of the best anime AI art generator websites and apps include the following, and you can discover more options from our complete list:
- niji・journey
- Midjourney
- Artbreeder
- Waifu Labs V2
- Waifu Diffusion
- PixAI.Art
- Holara
Wrapping Up
I hope you like what you see in this list, and there are indeed many awe-inspiring tools that are worth your time to play with!
Given the booming popularity of AI content creation and the skyrocketing AI art generators, chances are that this list fails to cover all the worthy anime art generators, so if you have anything in mind you think can enrich this list, please drop a line and let us know.
Further Reading: The 17 Best Live Wallpaper Apps for iPhone and iPad
⭐Motricialy is a technology blog that’s dedicated to delivering up-to-date information on everything new in today’s technology world. Go to Motricialy’s home page for more valuable posts like this. If you find our content appealing or useful, don’t forget to bookmark the site and check back later. Besides, your kind sharing would mean a bunch to us, you are doing your bit to keep the good things going!
