A new AI image generator has popped up without a named creator or any explanation, and it's seemingly already surpassing its competition

pcgamer.com:

I'm already quite sceptical of AI image generation. I'm cautious of the way it seems to flippantly skirt around (or entirely ignore) copyright, and I worry about the negative feedback loop of replacing artists from making art. Caution is important to practice, especially now that red_panda, a brand-new image-generation tool, has just been spotted on a site dedicated to voting for the best AI and rocked straight up to the top of the leaderboards. 

As reported by TechCrunch, a site called Artificial Analysis has a section called "Arena" that allows users to vote between two images on which fits a given prompt best—the two images being generated by different AI image generation models.

In the leaderboard, red_panda sits at the very top, with a 72% win rate. This means that in all the battles its images have found themself, it has only lost 28% of them.

Some in the comments of Artificial Analysis' post claim this could be a new version of Midjourney or Baidu's AI tool, and this could certainly be the case given the creator's name is obscured, but only time will tell what exactly red_panda is. This new tool has the highest ELO (generally perceived as a metric of quality) in the data pool and a fast generation time at seven seconds, but no price per image, as it's all fairly unknown. 

The win rate is and impressive figure, and that is why it was noted by the <a data-analytics-id=«inline-link» href=«https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/1850587843837771900?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet» target="_blank" data-url=«https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/1850587843837771900?ref_src=» https: referrerpolicy=«no-referrer-when-downgrade» data-hl-processed=«none»>Artificial Analysis X account

. At the time, it had an even more impressive track record, at a 79% win rate.

The red panda name does perhaps feel in poor taste with the energy costs of AI models like this, given it is an endangered animal partially down to deforestation and climate change. The images