AI Art Generator DALL-E Now Available to Everyone

The DALL-E image-generating AI made waves when it debuted earlier this year. The engine offers creepily accurate renderings of almost any description imaginable, and you can now access it free and without waiting through a queue. It’s not unlimited, but OpenAI will be happy to sell you more credits once you run through your allotment.

At its core, DALL-E is an advanced machine learning model built to understand natural language and turn it into an image. It’s not the first neural network to attempt this, but it’s certainly the most capable one that’s been made available to the general public. When it launched publicly in April 2022, demand was extremely high, and OpenAI had to use a waitlist to control access. Now, you can just sign up and begin creating your wildest dreams right away.

According to OpenAI, DALL-E is currently spitting out more than two million images per day with over 1.5 million active users. The company says feedback from users (especially artists) has helped to refine the quality of DALL-E images. Having used DALL-E earlier this year and again today, it does seem more accurate and “artistic.” The image at the top of this post was created with DALL-E from the prompt “abstract head in profile filled with glowing circuit boards.”

Since launching, DALL-E has also added new features like Outpainting, which allows you to leverage the AI to expand an image beyond its original borders. The AI just makes up more content out of nothing, and it’s surprisingly believable. You still have to provide a text prompt to tell the AI what the image is, though.

OpenAI says it’s already testing DALL-E with several potential customers with the aim of turning it into a paid service. While it’s free to try for individuals, you only get 50 credits per month, and each set of four text-prompted images eats up a credit. You can purchase an additional 115 credits for $15, which works out to 13 cents per action. But be aware, each frame you add to an image in Outpainting also costs you a credit. It could get spendy if you get really into tinkering with the AI. You could just sign up for more free accounts, but each one requires phone number verification.

Continue reading

OpenAI’s ‘DALL-E’ Generates Images From Text Descriptions

All you need to do is give DALL-E some instructions, and it can draw an image for you. Sometimes the renderings are little better than fingerpainting, but other times they're startlingly accurate portrayals.