Can Anyone Use DALL-E?
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in art is becoming more common with both professional artists and amateurs who use AI art generators to create digital images and other pieces of art. Dall-E is one of the most popular AI art tools that help artists generate realistic images and pieces of art from simple text prompts and other source images. The first version of DALL-E was developed in January 2021 by OpenAI, a research group committed to developing technologies to uplift mankind.
A year later, the organisation developed DALL-E 2, which is believed to offer better performance than the original version. But can anyone use DALL-E? Unfortunately, neither of the two programs is open source; both systems are only available to a select group of users. The mystery surrounding the new platform has left some people wondering if DALL-E 2 is real.
How Does DALL-E Work?
DALL-E is a text-to-image generation system that uses AI technology. The system generates realistic images from simple textual descriptions. It uses a GPT-3 Transformer model with 12 billion parameters to transform texts into corresponding images. The system also uses trained algorithms to understand and generate images from texts and other source images. This training helps the system understand different styles of digital art so that every image is as realistic as possible.
The system can generate original images from scratch by interpreting and transforming compositional sentences. You just need to be creative with your instructions. This doesn’t mean a professional script writer must write your text prompts. DALL-E can easily generate plausible images from the most peculiar sentences.
Poor memorisation of training data by AI art generators is one of the common problems in machine learning. Most art generators can only memorise the available training data to boost their training scores. They can’t generalise this information to new data very well during reading and testing. But DALL-E is said to be able to do this quite well when reading peculiar sentences, even when it hasn’t seen such composite sentences before.
It also improves contextual details in the image because it can imagine realistic details even when it hasn’t seen them before. The system, especially DALL-E 2, is said to be able to create a plausible visualisation of text prompts to make images more realistic and complete.
Who Can Use DALL-E?
Currently, DALL-E isn’t available to the public because it’s still going through formative stages. According to OpenAI, the system has only been released to a select group of handpicked users who are helping it run beta tests. The company hopes to use this group of users to identify areas that need improvement before the system is made available to the public. OpenAI insists the restrictions are meant to ensure that the system is used responsibly. If you want to use DALL-E, you must apply to join the waitlist.
The organisation fears that unscrupulous users might use the system to generate fake images and pieces of art or use it to run disinformation campaigns. That’s why it has come up with several safeguards, including watermarking all images generated by Dall-E and prohibiting selected users from generating images that contain violent, pornographic, or hate messages.
OpenAI also asserts that DALL-E is not planned for commercial use now or in the future. However, the organisation plans to open its application programming interface for noncommercial use once it attains a certain level of security. But its security experts must approve its release to the public. Currently, DALL-E 2 is available to 640 users, commonly referred to as the red team. The team’s main task is to find flaws and weaknesses that attackers can exploit to misuse the system.
Current users are supposed to adopt an attacker’s mindset and tactics to discover flaws in the system by stimulating what malicious users may use it for. If you want to experience the amazingness of DALL-E but you can’t get onto the waitlist, you can use available alternatives such as DALL-E Mini, which is a limited version of DALL-E. However, most alternatives lack some essential components found in the original DALL-E system. They may not give you the exact experience you would get from DALL-E but it gets the job done.