Microsoft is investing heavily in DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s AI-powered system that generates images from text, bringing it to proprietary applications and services. At its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced that it was integrating DALL-E 2 with the new Microsoft Designate Image Creator app and tool in Bing and Microsoft Edge.
With the advent of DALL-E 2 and open source alternatives like Steady broadcast in recent years, AI image generators have exploded in popularity. In September, OpenAI said that more than 1.5 million users were actively creating more than 2 million images per day with DALL-E 2, including artists, creative directors and authors. Brands such as Stitch Fix, Nestlé and Heinz have piloted DALL-E 2 for advertising campaigns and other business use cases, while some architectural firms have used DALL-E 2 and similar tools for conceptualize new buildings.
“Microsoft and OpenAI have been working closely since 2019 to accelerate breakthroughs in AI. We’ve partnered with OpenAI to responsibly develop, test, and scale the latest AI technologies,” Liat Ben-Zur, Microsoft’s CVP for Modern Life, Search, and Devices, told TechCrunch. by email. “Microsoft is the exclusive cloud service provider for OpenAI and is OpenAI’s preferred partner for bringing new AI technologies to market. We’ve started doing this through programs like Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot, and we’ll continue to explore solutions that harness the power of AI and advanced natural language generation.
Seeking to bring OpenAI’s technology to an even wider audience, Microsoft is releasing Designer, a Canva-like web application that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. Designer – whose ad leak Many times this spring and summer — leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2 to craft designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for additional customization and customization.
In Designer, users can choose from different templates to embark on specific designs with set dimensions for platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn Ads on Facebook, and Instagram Stories. Pre-made templates are available on the web, as are shapes, photos, icons, and headers that can be added to projects.
Image creator in Microsoft Edge and Bing.
“Microsoft Designer is powered by AI technology, including DALL-E 2, which means the ability to instantly generate a variety of designs,” Ben-Zur continued. “[It] helps you bring your ideas to life.
Designer will remain free for a limited preview period, according to Microsoft – users can sign up starting today. Once the Designer app becomes generally available, it will be included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions and will have “some” free features for non-subscribers, although Microsoft did not specify.
Another new application developed by Microsoft and supported by DALL-E 2 is Image Creator, which will be heading to Bing and Edge in the coming weeks. As the name suggests, Image Creator – accessible via the Bing Images tab or bing.com/create, or via the Image Creator icon in Edge’s sidebar – generates art from a prompt of text by funneling requests to DALL-E 2, acting as a front-end client for the still-beta OpenAI DALL-E 2 service.
Typing in a description of something, any additional context, like a location or activity, and an art style, will get you an image from Image Creator. “Image Creator will soon be creating images that don’t yet exist, limited only by your imagination,” Ben-Zur added.
Unlike Designer, Image Creator in Bing and Edge will be completely free, but Microsoft – wary of abuse and potential abuse – says it will take a “measured approach” to rolling out the app. Image Creator will initially only be available as a preview for certain geographies, which Microsoft says will allow it to gather feedback before developing the app further.
Microsoft designer.
Some image generation systems have been used to create objectionable content, such as graphic violence and pornographic, non-consensual celebrity deepfakes. JThe organization funding Stable Diffusion’s development, Stability AI, was even the subject of a recent critical letter from U.S. House Representative Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) to the National Security Adviser. (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. , in which she urged the NSA and OSTP to fight the release of “dangerous AI models” that “do not moderate content created on their platforms.”
Image-generating AI can also detect biases and toxicities embedded in the millions of web images used to train them. OpenAI itself Noted in an academic paper that an open source implementation of DALL-E could be trained to make stereotypical associations like generating images of white passing men in business suits for terms like “CEO”, for example.
In response to questions about mitigations in Designer and Image Creator, Microsoft noted that OpenAI removed explicit sexual and violent content from the dataset used to train DALL-E 2. The company also said that She had taken her own steps, including deploying filters to limit the generation of images that violate the content policy, blocking additional queries on sensitive topics, and technology to deliver “more diverse” images to results.
Users will need to agree to the above Terms of Service and Content Policy to start using Designer and Image Creator with their Microsoft account. If a user requests an image deemed inappropriate by Microsoft’s automated filters, they will receive a warning. If they repeatedly violate the content policy, they will be banned, but given the opportunity to appeal.
“It’s important with early technologies like DALL-E 2 to recognize that it’s new, and we expect it to continue to evolve and improve,” Ben-Zur said. “We take our commitment to responsible AI seriously…We won’t allow users to generate violent content, we may distort people’s faces, and we won’t show text strings used as input.”
Addressing some of the legal questions that have sprung up recently around AI-powered image generation systems, Microsoft says users will have “full” use rights to commercialize the images they create with Designer and Image Creator. (Among other hosts, Getty Images has banned the download and sale of artwork generated using DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and similar tools, citing fair use concerns about datasets training course containing copyrighted images.) In other words, the company – adopting a commercial use similar policy as OpenAI – will not claim ownership of prompts, captions, creatives, or other content that users provide, post, input, or submit to apps.
When asked if Microsoft believed the images used to form DALL-E 2 were fair use, Ben-Zur declined to answer.