OpenAI has just removed the waitlist for access to DALL-E 2, meaning that anyone can sign up to use the AI art generator immediately. OpenAI is known to have launched an early version of DALL-E in January 2021. The tool allowed converting any text description (hint) into a unique image, impressing AI experts and the public.
Since then, we have seen many other kinds of “text-to-image” AI systems, and the competition for speed and quality has become increasingly fierce.
Previous competing solutions, such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, have already opened up easy access to the public.
OpenAI, on the other hand, which has received huge funding from tech giants, has been cautious about the public release of DALL-E.
Experts point out that if the technology is misused, it could lead to damaging consequences such as offensive sexual harassment, misinformation, or bias.
The reason is that text-to-image machine learning systems are trained using large sets of image data crawled from the Internet.
For example, if an AI is asked to draw a picture of a CEO, it may carry the stereotype of “must be white.
In response, OpenAI has taken a number of countermeasures, including filtering out pornographic and violent images from its training dataset and refusing to generate images based on similar explicit cues.
But this move has also attracted some criticism because the corrective strategy is too simple and brutal, or even overkill. For example, when gender or race is not specified, the system will inadvertently insert the phrase “sub-black”.
This did mitigate the bias in DALL-E’s output (deliberately avoiding generating predominantly white images), but some users also noticed that the content created by the AI did not match its intended instructions.
The good news is that OpenAI said in a blog post today that it is satisfied with the improvements to the security system.
"Over the past few months, we have enhanced our filters to reject attempts to generate content such as pornographic violence that violates content policies, and built new detection and response technologies to block abuse. At the same time, OpenAI is testing the DALL-E API so that companies can build their own applications and plugins with the output of the AI. For example, the AI system can be combined with tools used by illustrators/designers to drive commercial adoption of DALL-E."
Finally, anyone who signs up to visit DALL-E will receive 50 free points, followed by 15 free points each month. Each 1 point can be used to claim a single image, an image variant, or to “fix” and “extend” the frame boundaries.
There are currently approximately 1.5 million users generating over 2 million images per day, and any excess over the free limit needs to be purchased for every 115 points / $15.
