You can now use the DALL-E 3 AI image generator inside Bing Chat

The AI-powered image generator inside Bing Chat is getting a big update today: Microsoft announced that OpenAI’s latest DALL-E 3 model is now available to all Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator users. It’s been rolling out for the past week, first to Bing Enterprise users and then to Bing Image Creator, but is now open to everyone.

Bing will get access to DALL-E 3 even before OpenAI’s own ChatGPT; that’s scheduled for this month, but only for paying users. Microsoft will likely be the most popular imaging tool for a while.

DALL-E 3 is, of course, the third version of OpenAI’s imaging model. The company says it understands cues much better than before and can create images that are more creative and photorealistic. It is also designed to be much easier to use; DALL-E 3 is built into Bing Chat and ChatGPT rather than powering a standalone product, so you can build and refine your image by chatting with a chatbot instead of endlessly trying to perfect your initial message.

OpenAI also built new security tools into DALL-E 3: It is designed not to recreate images of public figures, for example, and it should also not create hateful or NSFW images. Within Bing Image Creator, Microsoft is also incorporating watermarks into each image to identify them as AI-generated and has created its own content moderation system. But, as always, the proof will be in the images.

Microsoft also plans to use DALL-E technology in more than just Bing. It’s working on an AI imaging tool in the Paint app called Paint Cocreator, for example, that will bring the DALL-E model directly to Windows.

In theory, anyone can use DALL-E 3 now through Bing, although every time I’ve tried so far, it has “failed to process new requests” and refused to create my image. Apparently the servers have been overloaded for a while: Microsoft Mikhail Parakhin published“We expected a lot of interest, but we didn’t expect THAT much.”

When you make an image, it will not only create the one you requested, but also offer suggestions on where to go next: “Can you add a rainbow in the background?” “Let it be a cat instead of a dog.” “Add some birds around the waterfall.” (Bing Chat also didn’t create those images for me because the system was overloaded, but it seems like a fun way to create alongside the tool.)