Microsoft cancels Dall-E update following complaints about image quality.
Microsoft had to roll back a recent update to its Bing image generation model after users expressed their dissatisfaction, pointing out that its AI creations had lower quality than before.
Microsoft has decided to roll back its latest update of the Bing image generation system after receiving numerous complaints from users about the quality of the produced images. This update had implemented the latest version of OpenAI's Dall-E model, known as PR16. Since the launch of Bing Image Creator last spring, users have created billions of images from textual descriptions.
The initial announcement of this update, made late last year, promised a model that would be "twice as fast and of higher quality." However, Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's search chief, noted that the company’s internal testing showed that the quality of images generated by PR16 was "slightly better on average" compared to those generated by the previous version, Dall-E PR13. Nonetheless, users have reported a different experience. A comment on the Bing subreddit expressed a user’s frustration: “The DALLE we used to love is gone forever.”
To mitigate the widespread frustration, Ribas announced that the company will revert to the previous image generation model while quality issues with PR16 are addressed, a process that could take a couple of weeks. "We have been able to [reproduce] some of the reported issues and plan to revert to PR13 until we can fix them," Ribas wrote in a post. He added that the implementation process is quite slow and will take between 2 and 3 weeks to reach 100%.
Microsoft and OpenAI are not the only companies facing difficulties with their image generators. In February 2024, Google had to temporarily disable the Gemini image model due to the emergence of racially offensive representations.
In another realm, OpenAI has been at the center of controversy due to the leak of its video generation model, Sora. A group opposed to the company’s "art washing" actions disclosed unauthorized access to the Sora API, allowing users to generate video clips for a brief period before access was revoked. On the other hand, ChatGPT has also received significant improvements to its language model, promising to offer more natural and personalized writing.
