Microsoft is making a major investment in DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s AI-powered system that generates images from text by bringing them into first-party apps and services. During its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced that it is integrating DALL-E 2 with Bing and Microsoft Edge with the newly announced Microsoft Designer app and image creator tool.
With the advent of DALL-E 2 and open-source alternatives like Stable Diffusion in recent years, the popularity of AI image generators has exploded. In September, OpenAI announced that more than 1.5 million users are actively creating over 2 million images with DALL-E 2 every day, including artists, creative directors, and writers. Brands such as Stitch Fix, Nestlé and Heinz have tested DALL-E 2 for advertising campaigns and other commercial use cases, while certain architectural firms have used DALL-E 2 and similar tools to design new buildings.
“Microsoft and OpenAI have been working closely together since 2019 to accelerate breakthroughs in AI. We’ve partnered with OpenAI to develop, test, and responsibly scale the latest AI technologies,” Liat Ben-Zur, Microsoft’s CVP of modern life, search, and devices, told TechCrunch via email. “Microsoft is the exclusive provider of cloud computing services for OpenAI and OpenAI’s preferred partner for the commercialization of new AI technologies. We have started doing this through programs like Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot, and we will continue to look for solutions that leverage the power of AI and advanced natural language generation.”
To bring OpenAI’s technology to an even wider audience, Microsoft is launching Designer, a Canva-like web app that can create designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics, and more to share on social media media and other channels to share. Designer – whose announcement has been repeatedly leaked this spring and summer – uses user-generated content and DALL-E 2 to create designs with drop-down menus and text boxes for further customization and personalization.
Within Designer, users can choose from different templates to start with specific designs with defined dimensions for platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn Facebook Ads, and Instagram Stories. Ready-made templates are available online, as are shapes, photos, icons, and headings to add 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 create a variety of designs,” continued Ben-Zur. “[It] helps you bring your ideas to life.
Designer remains free during a limited preview period, Microsoft says — users can sign up starting today. Once the designer app is generally available, it will be included with Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions and will have “some” features that are free for non-subscribers, although Microsoft hasn’t elaborated on that.
Another new Microsoft-developed app powered by DALL-E 2 is Image Creator, which will be moving to Bing and Edge in the coming weeks. As its name suggests, Image Creator — which you can access from the Bing Images tab or bing.com/create, or from the Image Creator sidebar icon in Edge — generates art that receives a text prompt by making requests to DALL- E 2 and behave like this is a front-end client for OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 service, which is still in beta.
If you enter a description of something, additional context like location or activity, and an art style, Image Creator will give you an image. “Image Creator will soon create images that don’t exist yet and are only limited by your imagination,” added Ben-Zur.
Unlike Designer, Image Creator will be completely free in Bing and Edge, but Microsoft — wary of potential misuse and abuse — says it needs a “measured approach” to rolling out the app. Image Creator will initially only be available in preview for select regions, which Microsoft says will allow for feedback to be collected before the app expands further.
Microsoft Designer.
Some image generation systems have been used to create objectionable content, such as B. graphic violence and pornographic non-consensual deepfakes of celebrities. TThe organization funding the development of stable diffusion, Stability AI, was even the subject of a critical letter from US House Representative Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) to the National Security Advisor (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the NSA and OSTP to address the release of “unsafe AI models” that “do not moderate content created on their platforms.”
The image-generating AI can also pick up on the biases and toxicities embedded in the millions of images from around the web they are trained on. OpenAI itself noted in a scholarly paper that an open-source implementation of DALL-E could be trained to make stereotypical associations, such as generating images of men in white passports wearing business suits for terms like “CEO”.
In response to questions about mitigations in Designer and Image Creator, Microsoft noted that OpenAI removed explicit sexual and violent content from the data set used to train DALL-E 2. The company also said it has taken its own steps, including deploying filters to limit the generation of images that violate the content policy, additional blocking of queries about sensitive topics and technology to provide “more diverse” images for the results .
Users must agree to the Terms of Service and the above Content Policy in order to use Designer and Image Creator with their Microsoft account. If a user requests an image that Microsoft’s automatic filters deem inappropriate, they will receive a warning. If they repeatedly violate the content policy, they will be banned, but will have the opportunity to appeal.
“With early technologies like DALL-E 2, it’s important to recognize that this is new and we expect it to continue to evolve and improve,” said Ben-Zur. “We take our commitment to responsible AI seriously… We will not allow users to create violent content, we may distort people’s faces, and we will not display text strings used as input.”
Addressing some of the legal issues that have cropped up lately surrounding AI-powered image generation systems, Microsoft says users will have “full” usage rights to commercialize the images they create with Designer and Image Creator. (Getty Images, among other hosts, has banned the uploading and sale of illustrations created with DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and similar tools, citing concerns about the fair use of training datasets with copyrighted images.) In other words , the company – adopting a commercial usage policy similar to that of OpenAI – claims no ownership of any prompts, captions, creations, or other content that users provide, post, input, or transmit to the apps.
When asked if Microsoft believes the images used to train DALL-E 2 were fair use, Ben-Zur declined to answer.
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