Press Release

HKU Business School released a Comprehensive Evaluation Report on the Image Generation Capabilities of Artificial Intelligence Models, providing a systematic assessment of 15 text-to-image models and 7 multimodal large language models (LLMs). The results showed that ByteDance’s Dreamina and Doubao, as well as Baidu’s ERNIE Bot ranked among the top performers in terms of image content quality for new-image generation and image revision. However, despite DeepSeek having attracted global attention, its newly released text-to-image model, Janus-Pro, did not perform as well in new-image generation. HKU Business School researchers also found that while some text-to-image models excelled in content quality, their performance in safety and responsibility was significantly lacking. In general, multimodal LLMs demonstrated better overall performance compared to text-to-image models.

The frontier of AI models has evolved beyond text processing to encompass the ability to understand and generate visual content. These models not only comprehend images but also generate visual content based on textual prompts. This study presents a systematic evaluation of the image generation capabilities of AI models, focusing on two core tasks: generating new images and revising existing images. Using carefully curated multidimensional test sets, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of 22 AI models with image generation capabilities, including 15 text-to-image models and 7 multimodal large language models. The results show that ByteDance’s Dreamina and Doubao, as well as Baidu’s ERNIE Bot, demonstrate impressive performance in both new image generation and image revision tasks. Overall, multimodal large language models deliver superior performance compared to text-to-image models.