Underestimating the power of thumbnails is a rookie mistake that content creators often make. Unbeknown to most, thumbnails play an important role in whether or not you’re video goes viral or completely flops, and disappears into a Youtube abyss. 

This is because a good thumbnail can ensure that your content stands out from other competitors’ content in search results, it’ll also help to draw in new viewers and subscribers. 

In fact, Youtube states that its own data suggests that 90% of videos that are successful on its platform have unique thumbnail designs. Nevertheless, creating a good thumbnail can be complex, and not everyone has an eye for design or an interest in outsourcing thumbnail creation.

This is where AI comes in. You can make some decent headway toward a captivating thumbnail by leveraging some of the newly launched AI tools that are now accessible online, and in most cases for free.

Let’s take a look at how you can generate an original Youtube thumbnail using AI.

Choosing An AI Youtube Thumbnail Designer

The first and most streamlined option is to use an AI thumbnail generator. These design tools can generate a Youtube video thumbnail based on a text-based prompt. 

Unlike other AI tools, which we’ll be discussing a little later in this article, an AI Youtube thumbnail generator only offers this type of service, the design will even come in the correct dimensions for upload, which isn’t always the case with other AI tools. 

However, the downside to using a Youtube AI thumbnail generator is that the tool itself delivers very basic results, which you’ll need to edit and refine. 

Below is an example so that you can get a better idea of what the design output looks like. 

We’re using thumbnail.ai, and as a prompt, we added the title of this article “How to generate original youtube thumbnails using AI”. 

The results are very basic, but you are given the option to change the images, font style, color palette, etc. 

The tool is very basic but was worth mentioning due to the ease of use. If you’re looking for a more refined thumbnail, then the next section of the article will explain what AI tools you can use and how to use them in order to get the best results. 

Use General AI Tools To Create A YouTube Thumbnail

If you’re not satisfied with the deliverables achieved when using an AI thumbnail generator there’s no need to worry, as there are plenty of other AI tools you can use instead. 

For the best results, you can use a combination of a few different AI options that are accessible online and for free. Our suggestion would be to use Midjourney or competitor  DALL·E 2, paired with ChatGPT. 

And, if you’ve not yet heard of these AI tools then let’s take a quick look at some key info about each one.

ChatGPT is currently one of the most talked about AI tools. The language model was created by Open AI with the purpose of generating text responses in a human-like manner in order to answer questions, complete text, help with translation, and so on. 

DALL·E 2, is another fairly new AI tool that creates and designs unique images based on the prompts it’s been given. DALL·E 2 is also owned by OpenAI and is free to use. 

Lastly, we’ve got Midjourney an AI image generator that works in a similar manner to DALL·E 2, via text prompts. The downside to this software is that it’s currently only accessible via a Discord bot, and will cost $10 per month once you’ve used up your free trial of 25 free images. 

So, now that you have a better idea of what these tools are, let’s take a look at how you can leverage them to create a fantastic Youtube thumbnail that will help your content stand out from the crowd.

Here’s the process:

Step 1: Create Thumbnail Design Descriptions Using ChatGPT

To begin the process, you’ll want to open ChatGPT and use the tool to generate some thumbnail options based on your video’s description, title, and subtitle. 

For example, we’ve taken the title of this article and given ChatGPT the following prompt:

“Create 3 different Youtube thumbnail design ideas for a video titled: How To Generate Original Youtube Thumbnails Using AI”

Once you give this process a try with your personalized prompt you’ll receive three separate descriptions with design ideas for your thumbnail.

Now that you have three alternative design options for your video thumbnail it’s time to proceed to the next tool/step.

Step 2: Use Midjourney To Create Thumbnail Designs Using ChatGPT’s Prompts

During this next step, you’ll want to access Midjourney and prompt it to create an image using one of the design description options you received from ChatGPT.

Adding –ar 16:9 to your Midjourney prompt will ensure that the design is created using the correct aspect ratio for Youtube thumbnails.

Pretty impressive how quick the process is, right? But can DALL-E 2 generate better results? Let’s take a quick look at some alternative options.

Step 3: Generate Alternative Thumbnail Options Using DALL·E 2

If you want to compare your options and make sure that you’re choosing the best thumbnail there is, then you can feed the same prompt you used on Midjourney to DALL-E 2. 

Doing this can help you get an idea of alternative design directions while at the same time allowing you to better understand the capabilities of these two AI tools. 

DALL-E 2 does have some major downfalls when compared to its competitor Midjourney. Firstly, the AI tool only creates square images, which can be limiting when you’re wanting to generate designs in different formats, such as Youtube thumbnails. 

This means, that if you choose to use a design generated by Midjourney, you’ll have to edit and modify the aspect ratio before uploading the thumbnail to your Youtube studio. 

And, as mentioned previously, another downside of Midjourney is that the AI is only available in Discord in the form of a bot. This is fine if you already have a Discord account, but if you don’t, it adds a couple of steps and a learning curve to the process.

Step 4: Use Photoshop Or Canva For Final Touches

The last step is to refine and add any final touches to your AI-generated thumbnails using Photoshop or Canva. All of these tools are fairly new, meaning that they each come with restrictions such as the lack of formats offered by DALL-E 2. 

Both the image generator AI tools are also not that great when it comes to text, so it’s probably better if you download the image from Midjourney or DALL-E 2 and then use Canva to overlay the text yourself.

You can spruce up and finish your thumbnail designs using software such as Photoshop if you have a budget, or Canva if you’d prefer to use free software.

Canva is a cloud-based and online design tool that offers a wide range of images, graphic vectors, fonts, videos, and even design templates. Canva’s interface is really simple to use, and perfect for a newbie or someone who isn’t trained in graphic design. 

Using Photoshop requires more of a learning curve and can be more complex.

Conclusion

So there you have it!

Currently, AI is still not capable of generating the perfect Youtube thumbnail without requiring some form of human editing and oversight. Nevertheless, these tools can be valuable for streamlining your content creation process and generating new ideas.

By using ChatGPT to quickly create a variety of design descriptions that you then use as prompts for DALL-E and Midjourney you can create unique Youtube thumbnails in a matter of minutes, which will help to attract new viewers and subscribers to your channel. And in some cases, will even help your video go viral!