Microsoft is giving its in-development Bing AI chatbot the ability to generate images, the company announced today. Bing preview users can create images by typing “create image”(or something similar) followed by a prompt. As with other AI-based image generators, the more detailed the query you provide, the more specific and consistent the result will be.
Not all Bing preview users will be able to generate images right away as Microsoft is rolling out this feature in stages (it didn’t work for me at the time of this writing). Initially, it will only work in the “creative”mode of the chatbot. The bot has three “personalities”and “Creative”is the most prone to giving incorrect answers and inaccurate information.
Microsoft has stated that it is using an “enhanced version”of the DALL-E generator, without providing further details. The Bing chatbot used the OpenAI GPT-4 model weeks before it was officially announced to the public, so Microsoft could also use the more powerful preview version of the DALL-E model. The image generator that Microsoft made public in October uses DALL-E 2.
Mindful of early issues with text that the Bing chatbot could generate, Microsoft is introducing additional security measures in content generation in addition to OpenAI’s own built-in DALL-E limits.
“When our system detects that a potentially dangerous image could be generated by a tooltip, it blocks the tooltip and warns the user,”Microsoft VP Yusuf Mehdi wrote in a company blog. “We also clarify that Image Creator images are generated by artificial intelligence, and we add a modified Bing icon to the bottom left corner of each image to indicate that the image was created with Image Creator.”
Throughout the year, Microsoft has been pushing to include more AI features in all of its products. Initially, the “new Bing”debuted in early February, and shortly after, Microsoft added Bing Chat integration to the Edge browser and Windows 11 taskbar. Last week, the company announced Copilot, an artificial intelligence tool for creating documents, emails, notes, and presentations using former Microsoft Office applications. The company has a multi-year, multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI that makes all of these projects possible.
To access all the features of the Bing Chatbot, you must select the preview version, which is currently invite-only but still accepting new registrations.