OpenAI today announced DALL-E 2, a major upgrade to its text-to-image neural network first unveiled in January 2021. The new model produces images at 1024x1024 resolution—up from 256x256—with near-photorealistic quality, and introduces editing capabilities such as inpainting and variations.

DALL-E 2 is a complete redesign from its predecessor. Instead of extending GPT-3 to predict pixels, the model works in two stages: first, OpenAI’s CLIP system translates a text prompt into an intermediate representation; then a diffusion model generates an image from random pixels guided by that representation. This produces higher-resolution images more quickly. Researchers can sign up for access today, and OpenAI plans a staged public rollout informed by feedback from initial users.

OpenAI has implemented some built-in safeguards. The model was trained on data that had some objectionable material weeded out, includes a watermark, and cannot generate recognizable faces based on a name. Users are banned from uploading or generating images that are not G-rated and could cause harm, including hate symbols, nudity, obscene gestures, or major conspiracies or events related to major ongoing geopolitical events.

AI researcher Mark Riedl says DALL-E scores well on his Lovelace 2.0 test of creative intelligence, though he says terms like “create” and “understand” are ill-defined and subject to debate. OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever described the system as “transcendent beauty as a service,” while artist Holly Herndon said it feels like working in a new medium. OpenAI’s examples include a horse-riding astronaut, teddy bear mad scientists, and a shiba inu in a beret and turtleneck.