Microsoft today announced that its new AI-enabled Bing will now allow users to generate images with Bing Chat. This new feature is powered by DALL-E, OpenAI’s generative image generator. The company didn’t say which version of DALL-E it is using here, except for saying that it is using the “very latest DALL-E models.”
Dubbed the “Bing Image Creator,” this new capability is now (slowly) rolling out to users in the Bing preview and will only be available through Bing’s Creative Mode. It’ll come to Bing’s Balanced and Precise modes in the future. The new image generator will also be available in the Edge sidebar.
The right prompts will generate the now-familiar square of four high-res DALL-E images. There’s one major difference, though: There will be a small Bing logo in the bottom-left corner.
The early Bing AI release was missing a few guardrails, but Microsoft quickly fixed those. The company is clearly hoping to avoid these issues with this release.
“We have incorporated OpenAI’s safeguards and added additional protections to Image Creator,” Microsoft explains. “For example, we have put controls in place that aim to limit the generation of harmful or unsafe images. When our system detects that a potentially harmful image could be generated by a prompt, it blocks the prompt and warns the user.”
Microsoft says that it will continue to iterate on this new image generator. Specifically, the company stresses that it is working on optimizing how this new feature works in multi-turn chats. “We continue to believe the best way to bring these technologies to market is to test them carefully, in the open, where everyone can provide feedback,” the company blog post notes.
In addition to the new image generator, Bing is also getting two additional new search features: Visual Stories and Knowledge Cards 2.0. Bing’s previous version of these Knowledge Cards was akin to Google’s knowledge panels, but they now come with the added twist of including AI-generated infographics and more interactive elements like charts, graphs and timelines.
Visual Stories, meanwhile, are more akin to AI-generated Instagram stories. Best I can tell, Microsoft has been testing these quite a bit in recent weeks since they’ve been popping up in my searches with some frequency. These stories come with AI-generated audio narration and, depending on the topic, videos. Sometimes they will be the top search results, but they can also appear in the Knowledge Cards. When searching for “Portland, Oregon,” for example, Bing will highlight stories like “How Portlander find fungus in the city” and “Portland: America’s quirkiest city.” Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a way to directly link to these stories.
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