Microsoft is canceling the model update of its artificial intelligence-powered image creation tool Bing Image Creator, TechCrunch reports. The decision to roll back the tool came after weeks of user complaints that it was performing worse after Microsoft “updated” it to the new DALL-E 3 model on December 18.
Microsoft refused to comment on its decision to roll back the tool or explain what exactly could have caused the gap between user expectations and search results.
Today, Microsoft’s head of search, Jordi Ribas, tweeted that they were able to reproduce “some of the issues that were reported” and are now reverting back to the old DALL-E model, although it may take several weeks before this is complete.
As soon as Ribas published the announcement of the change in December, complaints surfaced that Bing Image Creator was producing less detailed results or images that did not accurately reflect their prompts. In his first responses, Ribas said that the quality of the model’s results “should be slightly better on average” than before.
It was the same story in posts and comments on the Reddit and OpenAI community forums. On the OpenAI forums, a person complained about the way the model handled the fabric on the anime character’s dress. The person who posted the images below says that the left image is of “perfect quality” and the right image is “overexposed”.
These are all subjective things, and I can’t say that one looks better than the other. If anything, this shows that Microsoft is not only dealing with bug complaints or dissatisfied feature changes, but also with art critics who compare the machine’s output to what they think it should produce. Perhaps they should ask the artists on whose works the generators have been trained how to manage customer expectations?
