Text-to-image models create visual assets from natural-language descriptions and, increasingly, from reference images. They are useful when a product needs quick visual exploration, many variants, or user-directed creative output. They are a poor fit when the output must be precise, rights-sensitive, or repeatable across many runs.

In real systems, image generation shows up in thumbnails, ad variants, product mockups, storyboards, educational illustrations, game assets, and design exploration. The model is only one part of the system. You also need prompt construction, style control, moderation, caching, human review, asset storage, and rights management.

This chapter explains how modern image generators work, how to choose a provider, how to write prompts that are specific without becoming brittle, and how to ship image generation safely in a product.