UPDATE 9/29: The sign-up snafus appear to have been resolved.
Original Story:
If you’ve been eager to try out DALL-E 2, an AI-powered program that can generate art from any text you type, there’s good news: The waitlist has finally been lifted.
On Wednesday, OpenAI, the research lab behind the AI program, announced it was finally removing the waitlist for DALL-E 2 over five months after debuting the technology.
But in some bad news, the sign-up system for DALL-E 2 is currently going through an outage, an indication that OpenAI’s website for the program is dealing with a flood of new users. We tried to create an account for DALL-E 2 several times, but have so far met only an error page. Other users on Twitter have reported the same.
DALL-E 2 has been grabbing headlines for its ability to create professional-looking, imaginative art based on whatever you type into the program. The technology is so powerful it can generate images through a variety of art styles in seconds or minutes, when it’d take a professional human artist hours, days, or weeks to create a similar image. In addition, OpenAI has been letting users generate a limited number of images through the program for free.
Back in July, OpenAI reported it had given 100,000 users early access to try DALL-E 2. Now the research lab says over 1.5 million users are using the program to create more than 2 million images a day.
Removing the waitlist means the public can expect even more AI-generated art to circulate over the internet. In addition to DALL-E 2, similar AI-art creating programs such as Midjourney and StableDiffusion can also generate images from a mere line of text. Recently, one user even tapped Midjourney to create a sci-fi looking image, which went on to win a digital art competition in Colorado to much controversy.
The rise of DALL-E 2 and other programs has sparked debate over whether the AI-powered programs threaten human-created art or might one day replace human digital artists. It’s also stirred up concerns over whether AI art programs will be exploited to create realistic-looking, but ultimately fake images to spread disinformation.
OpenAI says it’s already introduced safeguards to prevent abuse. “Learning from real-world use has allowed us to improve our safety systems, making wider availability possible today,” the research lab wrote in Wednesday’s blog post. “In the past months, we’ve made our filters more robust at rejecting attempts to generate sexual, violent, and other content that violates our content policy and built new detection and response techniques to stop misuse.
The lab has also been taking feedback from artists, who've been experimenting with DALL-E 2 as well. "Artists have already created remarkable images with the new Outpainting feature, and helped us better understand its capabilities in the process."