Microsoft is making a major investment in DALL-E 2, OpenAI\u2019s AI-powered system that generates images from text, by bringing it to first-party apps and services. During its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced that it\u2019s integrating DALL-E 2 with the newly announced Microsoft Designer app and Image Creator tool in Bing and Microsoft Edge.<\/p>\n
With the advent of DALL-E 2 and open source alternatives like Stable Diffusion in recent years, AI image generators have exploded in popularity. In September, OpenAI said that more than 1.5 million users were actively creating over 2 million images a day with DALL-E 2, including artists, creative directors and authors. Brands such as Stitch Fix, Nestl\u00e9 and Heinz have piloted DALL-E 2 for ad campaigns and other commercial use cases, while certain architectural firms have used DALL-E 2 and tools akin to it to conceptualize new buildings.<\/p>\n
\u201cMicrosoft and OpenAI have partnered closely since 2019 to accelerate breakthroughs in AI. We have teamed up with OpenAI to develop, test and\u202fresponsibly scale the latest AI technologies,\u201d Microsoft CVP of modern life, search and devices Liat Ben-Zur told via email. \u201cMicrosoft is the exclusive provider of cloud computing services to OpenAI and is OpenAI\u2019s preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies. We\u2019ve\u202fstarted to do\u202fthis through programs like the Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot, and we\u2019ll continue to explore solutions that harness the power of AI and advanced natural language generation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seeking to bring OpenAI\u2019s tech to an even wider audience, Microsoft is launching Designer, a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. Designer \u2014 whose announcement leaked repeatedly this spring and summer \u2014 leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2 to ideate designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for further customization and personalization.<\/p>\n
Within Designer, users can choose from various templates to get started on specific, defined-dimensions designs for platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn Facebook ads and Instagram Stories. Prebuilt templates are available from the web, as are shapes, photos, icons and headings that can be added to projects.<\/p>\n
Image Creator in Microsoft Edge and Bing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cMicrosoft Designer is powered by AI technology, including DALL-E 2, which means the ability to instantly generate a variety of designs,\u201d Ben-Zur continued. \u201c[It] helps you bring your ideas to life.<\/p>\n
Designer will remain free during a limited preview period, Microsoft says \u2014 users can sign up starting today. Once the Designer app is generally available, it\u2019ll be included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions and have \u201csome\u201d functionality free to use for non-subscribers, though Microsoft didn\u2019t elaborate.<\/p>\n
Another new Microsoft-developed app underpinned by DALL-E 2 is Image Creator, heading to Bing and Edge in the coming weeks. As the name implies, Image Creator \u2014 accessed via the Bing Images tab or bing.com\/create, or through the Image Creator icon in the sidebar within Edge \u2014 generates art given a text prompt by funneling requests to DALL-E 2, acting like a frontend client for OpenAI\u2019s still-in-beta DALL-E 2 service.<\/p>\n
Typing in a description of something, any additional context, like location or activity, and an art style will yield an image from Image Creator. \u201cImage Creator will soon create images that don\u2019t yet exist, limited only by your imagination,\u201d Ben-Zur added.<\/p>\n
Unlike Designer, Image Creator in Bing and Edge will be completely free to use, but Microsoft \u2014 wary of potential abuse and misuse \u2014 says it\u2019ll take a \u201cmeasured approach\u201d to rolling out the app. Image Creator will initially only be available in preview for select geographies, which Microsoft says will allow it to gather feedback before expanding the app further.<\/p>\n
![\"Microsoft](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/gp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Start-from-Scratch-Large-960-5fps.gif\")
<\/p>\nMicrosoft Designer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Some image-generating systems have been used to create objectionable content, like graphic violence and pornographic, nonconsensual celebrity deepfakes. The organization funding the development of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, was even the subject of a critical recent letter from U.S. House Representative Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) to the National Security Advisor (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, in which she urged the NSA and OSTP to address the release of \u201cunsafe AI models\u201d that \u201cdo not moderate content made on their platforms.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Image-generating AI can also pick up on the biases and toxicities embedded in the millions of images from the web 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 \u201cCEO,\u201d for example.<\/p>\n In response to questions about mitigation measures in Designer and Image Creator, Microsoft noted that OpenAI removed explicit sexual and violent content from the dataset used to train DALL-E 2. But Microsoft also said that it took steps of its own, including deploying filters to limit the generation of images that violate content policy, additional query blocking on sensitive topics and technology to deliver \u201cmore diverse\u201d images to results.<\/p>\n Users will have to agree to terms of use and the aforementioned content policy to start using Designer and Image Creator with their Microsoft account. If a user requests an image deemed inappropriate by Microsoft\u2019s automated filters, they\u2019ll get a warning. If they repeatedly violate the content policy, they\u2019ll be banned, but have a chance to appeal.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s important, with early technologies like DALL-E 2, to acknowledge that this is new, and we expect it to continue to evolve and improve,\u201d Ben-Zur said. \u201cWe take our commitment to responsible AI seriously \u2026 We will not allow users to generate violent content, we may distort people\u2019s faces and won\u2019t show text strings used as input.\u201d<\/p>\n Addressing some of the legal questions that\u2019ve sprung up recently around AI-powered image generation systems, Microsoft says that users will have \u201cfull\u201d usage rights to commercialize the images they create with Designer and Image Creator. (Among other hosts, Getty Images has banned the upload and sale of illustrations generated using DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and similar tools, citing fair use concerns about training datasets containing copyrighted images.) In other words, the company \u2014 adopting a commercial usage policy similar to OpenAI\u2019s \u2014 won\u2019t claim ownership of prompts, captions, creations or any other content that users provide, post, input or submit to the apps.<\/p>\n When asked whether Microsoft believes the images used to train DALL-E 2 were fair use, Ben-Zur declined to answer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Microsoft is making a major investment in DALL-E 2, OpenAI\u2019s AI-powered system that generates images from text, by bringing it to first-party apps and services. During its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced that it\u2019s integrating DALL-E 2 with the newly announced Microsoft Designer app and Image Creator tool in Bing and Microsoft Edge. With […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1222648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1222646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1222646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1222646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1222646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1222646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}