What You May Have Missed #3
OpenAI removes DALL·E waitlist / Bruce Willis' digital twin / Text-to-video & text-to-3D / Stock AI image libraries are now a thing
OpenAI has removed the waitlist for DALL·E
What happened
OpenAI has removed DALL·E's waitlist completely. Those of you who didn’t have access yet can now log in and start playing with it right away. Most of you, however, either have access or are already using Stable Diffusion or Midjourney. DALL·E isn't as attractive as it was in April.
Why it’s relevant
One notable distinction between DALL·E and the others is that OpenAI did a great job in removing the necessity to learn prompt engineering by delegating the work to the algorithm—it's quite easy to get good results, especially photorealistic images with simple prompts. In contrast, Stable Diffusion gets you rawer images. Midjourney, although also has a filter, it’s just to make sure the output images are beautiful.
Another feature where DALL·E surpasses the others is inpainting and outpainting (Stability.ai's DreamStudio now allows for this but nowhere near DALL·E’s quality). My approach is now going to be a combination of Midjourney's sense of beauty, Stable Diffusion's versatility, and DALL·E's in- and outpainting skills.
But why has OpenAI removed the waitlist now? Among other factors, the answer lies in open source tendencies. Although it was the company that sparked global interest in generative art, popularizing already existing techniques with DALL·E, it was soon overshadowed by more accessible alternatives. DALL·E mini was the first that, although significantly lower quality, revealed people's interest in using the models first-hand instead of witnessing the emerging art scene from the fence.
High-quality options didn't take long to appear. First, the secretly-managed Midjourney (more open than DALL·E but not open source) and then Stability.ai, which took AI art to the next level by opening a state-of-the-art model.
These initiatives, which directly compete against OpenAI (which, contrary to Google, intended to leverage its generative models for profit), are most likely a critical factor in the company's decision to allow everyone in.
In my opinion, they're quite late and people have long forgotten they started it all with DALL·E (the first one) and CLIP. This is a lesson about the value of open source: On the one hand, it democratizes AI, and, on the other hand, it pressures those that, in the name of safety, advocate for privacy and control.