I admit, I kinda stopped following all the different AI models and aggregator sites after I found Google's ImageFx, Whisk, and Flow interfaces. But now even with a Pro account, I'm hitting the "unusual activity" filter with frustrating regularity, to the point where I need to refresh the page or clear cookies after only one or two generations, and sometimes even before it will generate my first prompt of the day. This back-end throttling has annoyed me to the point that I'm willing to break out of my comfort zone.

What generators are you all using, or which ones would you recommend I look into?

My biggest concern is that the generator is consistently capable of creating photo-quality or near-photo-quality images. Sensitive filters aren't really a concern of mine, as I rarely even trigger ChatGPT's content filters with my tame stuff.

I don't have a high-end computer, so self-hosted generators probably won't work for me.

I'm not really happy with generating images in ChatGPT, because the output is unpredictable whether it'll be photo-quality or obviously fake, and the image creator is so slow. I don't really want to subscribe to a new aggregator without knowing it'll give me decent output for a hopefully comparable price point of $20 USD/month (the aggregator sites I used to use are now crazy expensive or else shut down).

I have also recently had strong censorship suddenly appear on the solutions I was using to generate both WAM images and WAM videos.

Unfortunately, this isn't censorship in Flow, at least not the "unusual activity" filter. It's just a straight-up back-end throttling (and not the good kind? lol) that Google seems to be using to reduce costs by forced reduction in demand.

I get that occasionally but normally resolves itself quickly with a refresh or starting a new project. Flow is still by far the cheapest implementation of NB2/Pro and the censorship is pretty low. Api is marginally better but generally not noticeable.

The image limits have definitely reduced dramatically lately

But, if you're using a VPN, I've found that even remaining logged in, once i get to that 'Failed' message, if I just hop countries, it's fine again.

Interestingly, it seems in some countries you get way more images before it fails than in others.

According to Gemini, the "unusual activity" errors (which are plaguing me too) are another consequence of the servers being unable to handle the increased traffic following the forced migration from Whisk. Instead of displaying some kind of "server overload - please try again" error, "unusual activity" gets displayed instead and persists in the hope that users will go away and come back later when the servers aren't having an issue.

It makes sense as an explanation but, obviously, Google will lose users if they don't get on top of things. After all it was their decision to bulldoze through the discontinuation of Whisk when they did. It seems like they weren't ready to handle the implications of it and still aren't more than a month on.

I still love Flow, and the error isn't necessarily a deal-breaker, but it's really frustrating. The suggested workarounds like refreshing the page, clearing cookies, etc, contribute to the problem, at least according to my understanding of it: it's meant as a bot blocker, and a blank slate makes you look like a bot to the system.

I have ADHD, so trying to slow down my prompting often leads to me getting distracted by other things in other windows, which I guess is good (spam-wise), but isn't so good when I'm actually working on a project.

The interesting thing is that I almost never get the error on my phone using the mobile version of the Flow website, but get it every few generations on my desktop computer. Same account, same wifi router, just a different device.

But from everything I've seen so far, it's still the best, cheapest option out there, so I guess I'll just have to suck it up and deal with it. On Nightcafe and Seaart, I'd blow through my monthly allotment in a single session, but with Flow, image generations are "free" with a Pro account.

It took me a while to find how the Whisk images it migrated into Flow, and I'm *really* disappointed it only imported the images, and not the prompts or any way to search through them unless you were smart and labeled the projects individually. All of mine are named by date by default, so I'm just navigating through them blindly.

Also, Google so proudly announced recently that now you can search through your creations, but kinda buried that the search feature only works within projects, so you can't search for old projects. And I've been using Whisk and Flow almost exclusively for a few years now, so I have a LOT of projects.

Apparently, Google meant for us to do everything within a single project, not create a new project for each new idea. So for me, the search feature is pretty much useless. My only option for finding old projects is endless scrolling, reuploading from my computer, or importing single images into a project.

Unless maybe I missed a setting or something on search? But Google's help page only talks about searching within projects.

Sheesh... I think I'm rambling and whining now, so I'll stop lol.

I haven't investigated the search facility as yet, but all of my images and videos that were migrated from Whisk did come across with their prompts accessible and intact. This is particularly notable for the videos as it wasn't possible to see the prompts for them in Whisk. I've no idea why your experience of the migration has been so different.

How did you find them? I can't find a way to search for them. I have a few thousand projects, and the only way I've found to get to them is to just scroll way down on the Projects page (You're right: it did import the prompts too). So, they're accessible, but very inconvenient without being able to search.

The Import Asset feature is pretty useless unless the project has a title or I know the date of the original project, and each time I open a project through the feature to see what's in it, it resets the project scroll to the most recent. Search only searches through the current project, unless I'm missing something.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "them", but my projects only number in the tens rather than thousands, so it's far easier for me to browse through projects than it will be for you. Even so, if I'm trying to find a particular image and can't remember what project it's in that does get frustrating, so it must be driving you up the wall with so many images. One small consolation is that Flow loads the images within a project more quickly than Whisk did.