OpenAI text-image AI platform now open to public as interest in the technology grows

OpenAI announced that Dall-E their cloud service that generates images from text input would now be open to the public without any waitlist. The previous version of the platform required that interested users sign up and then wait for an invite from the company’s internal team.

The reason behind this, OpenAI said, was to prevent users from abusing the product and using it to generate violent, pornographic, or hateful content. They also said they were trying to avoid a situation where users used the platform to create photo-realistic images of public figures.

“To ensure responsible use and a great experience, we'll be sending invites gradually over time," OpenAI had said in an email to registered users. "We'll let you know when we're ready for you.”

Unfortunately, this move by OpenAI may have seen them miss out on the market as other text-to-image platforms that were more accommodating began to come up.

In May this year, as OpenAI was issuing about 1,000 invites per week, another platform called Midjourney entered the market and by the end of July, the discord server being used by the company reached about one million users. At the time of writing this, the Discord server has about 2.7million users while OpenAI claims to have 1.5million users.

Just recently another AI company called Stability.ai released its own text-to-image platform called Stable Diffusion under a permissive CreativeML Open RAIL-M license.

Unlike OpenAI and Midjourney which require payment from users after they have exceeded their monthly limit, Stable Diffusion’s code can be run on a local computer meaning users don’t have to worry about fees.

As a result, the new Platform is rapidly gaining momentum and people have not held back on their creativity.

“In just a few days, there has been an explosion of innovation around it," wrote Simon Willison, an open source software developer, in a blog post. "The things people are building are absolutely astonishing."

Even better for users, there is not a lot of censorship on the platform allowing them to get really wild with their imagination.

OpenAI may have found a real competitor in form of Stable Diffusion and whether or not they can keep up, only time will tell.

A lot of experts seem to believe that it may be game over for Dall-E.