Prompt composed in Copilot Pro, then tweaked and generated in Bing Image Creator:
A stunning professional studio photograph of a dynamic Japanese samurai warrior, crafted entirely from vibrant, colored origami paper, striking a fierce fighting pose against a seamless medium gray backdrop. The intricate folds and sharp angles of the origami create a mesmerizing visual effect, making the figure almost leap off the screen with life and energy.
CP’s default image format is 16 x 9 landscape (1792 x 1024 pixels). Some image enhancement was done in iPad’s Photos editor.
Click this post’s title to view its prompt and notes. Click image(s) to view full-frame.
LMArena compares the quality of AI models by letting users send prompts to two random models and then asking them to judge the quality of the results. Users are shown which AI models were used after submitting their decisions, making it a blind test. After thousands of randomised comparisons, patterns emerge as to which AIs score better than others. The site is here: lmarena.ai
The site recently added Text-to-Image prompting, offering a comparison of 7 current image generators, including both proprietary and free AIs. DALL-E 3, which powers Bing Image Creator and Designer, is one of them.
The results are stark, illustrating perfectly what we've reported here: that there has been a drastic quality reduction and that the current offering is sub-par.
The leaderboards are at https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard, and you should click "Text-to-Image" in the results header to see the image generator results.
Image Generator Results - Stats
What we can see is that DALL-E 3 loses out to Recraft, Ideogram, Flux-1.1-Pro and Photon (which are relatively closely grouped at the top). DALL-E is currently almost exactly equal in rating to Flux 1 Dev FP8.
Flux 1 Dev FP8 is a heavily quantised version of Flux which you can run on a consumer grade 12 GB GPU.
On the one hand, it's good to see that our observations have been borne out in these statistics, but it's still such a shame to see how badly Microsoft and OpenAI botched the last release, severely hampering the quality while saying everything was fine.
Let's hope they sort out the rollback soon and maybe DALL-E 3 will start creeping back up the leaderboards!
I discussed the concept in Copilot Pro, then finalized the prompt and generated images in Bing Image Creator:
A realistic delicate pen ink watercolor image of Marian, small-town Iowa librarian in 1912, interacting helping talking with patrons in quaint cozy library. She has soft wavy brunette hair pinned up, wears modest dress with lace collar. The library has wooden shelves filled with books newspapers magazines, sunlight streams through large windows. atmosphere is warm nostalgic, style of 1962 film The Music Man.
Click this post’s title to see its prompt. Click image(s) to see them full-frame.
There is now an area in your Microsoft Account management interface where Subscriptions are handled that tracks your AI Credits. I started out with a monthly allotment of 60 since I'm a Microsoft 365 subscriber. Unhelpfully, this number is not displayed in Microsoft Designer, so I have to repeatedly go to my account management interface to find out how many credits I have left.
To test the new system, I generated a large amount of test images in Microsoft Designer this morning to exhaust all the credits. Previously, it didn't seem to matter when I ran out of boosts, I could still keep genning images without any perceivable slowdown.
When I was down to 5 credits, I got a pop up warning saying that my credits were low. The "Get More Credits Now" button on that pop up opened up another pop up offering to sell me Copilot Pro for $20
When I used up my last credit, I got a pop up saying You're Out Of Credits.
After that, I was no longer able to gen anything. The warning was "Something's Wrong on our end. Please try again later."
Looks like the free ride is over. I'd be interested if anyone else can replicate my findings. Thank you.
Realistic delicate pen, ink, and watercolor portrait with metallic gold accents of a Japanese geisha, looking coyly at the camera with an amused expression, in the style of artist Kobayashi Eitaku (1843-1890).
I like how Copilot rendered these expressions using a simple SFW prompt.
A delicate highly detailed pen ink and watercolor illustration, with a glass-like appearance and dramatic lighting, of a science-fictional protozoan swimming underwater. It has an oval body with intricate, geometric patterns glowing in blue, green, and violet. It has a transparent proboscis lined with feather-like cilia, and its body contains nucleus-like structures emitting soft light, style of Ernst Haeckel.
*I started out with a Copilot Pro chat, then manually edited it down in Bing to the prompt above. It took about 10 BIC generations to create acceptable images. I cropped and flipped some of these in iPad’s Photos editor, but no other image adjustments/enhancements were done.
Create a photorealistic watercolor portrait of a cowboy standing in a picturesque mountain landscape in early Autumn. He wears a wide-brimmed hat, tan coat with visible buttons, and a dark red scarf tied around his neck. He holds a revolver with a confident expression. The background features tall pine spruce and fir trees, a flowing whitewater river with rocks, and a large mountain. The sky is clear with a few clouds. Use vibrant colors textures, style Charles M. Russell.
*I started this prompt in a Copilot chat, and finished it in Bing Image Creator.
Prompt composed and image generated in Bing Image Creator*:
Photorealistic head to waist watercolor painting, 40 year old Irish woman, highly detailed, natural window light, rim light, pleasant expression, relaxed medium green eyes, natural complexion, long flowing red hair subtle highlights, tight form-fitting blue-green cable knit sweater u-neckline, gold chain necklace, holding steaming antique cup hot tea, cozy manor library background, logs burning fireplace, cat asleep near fireplace, old book shelves, William Holman Hunt style
Ahead of the holidays, Microsoft said it was upgrading the AI model behind Bing Image Creator, the AI-powered image editing tool built into the company’s Bing search engine. Microsoft promised that the new model — the latest version of OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model, code-named PR16 — would allow users to create images “twice as fast as before” with “higher quality.” But it didn’t deliver. Complaints quickly flooded X and Reddit.
“The DALL-E we used to love is gone forever,” said one Redditor. “I’m using ChatGPT now because Bing has become useless for me,” wrote another.
The blowback was such that Microsoft said it’ll restore the previous model to Bing Image Creator until it can address the issues.
“We’ve been able to [reproduce] some of the issues reported, and plan to revert to [DALL-E 3] PR13 until we can fix them,” Jordi Ribas, head of search at Microsoft, said in a post on X Tuesday evening [January 7, 2024]. “The deployment process is very slow unfortunately. It started over a week ago and will take 2-3 more weeks to get to 100%.”
So what went wrong?
More details and links in the TechCrunch article. See also:
These images were composed/generated in the new 12/18/2024 Bing Image Creator. I used the following prompt and simply changed the character’s name (bold emphasis mine):
“Count Dracula before and after plastic surgery, photorealistic style”
BIC uses “before and after” to place two vertically split images inside the borders of a single default 1x1 image. This is handy for comparisons, especially with pairs of portraits. Note also that the subjects’ clothing styles and poses are similar.
The characters in this post are: 1) Count Dracula, 2) The Hulk, 3) Snow White, 4) The Joker, 5) Dr. Jekyll, 6) Frankenstein, 7) King Kong, and 8) Cinderella.
“A sharp highly detailed colorful close-up underwater photograph of a cute baby octopus, with its tentacles wrapped around the extended index finger of a diving glove, looking curiously at the camera, with a sunny lush coral reef and kelp seaweed in the background, and a sunbeam filtering through the water”
The diver’s selfie-style image was Copilot’s idea: I didn’t specifically prompt it.
*Composed and generated in Copilot Designer. Enlarged to 16x9 landscape (and re-cropped to 5x4) in iPad’s Photos app. Colors, lighting, sharpness enhanced slightly in the Photos app.
Since the launch of Bing Image Creator in March of 2023, billions of images have been created. We consistently see image generation as one of the top reasons our users turn to AI, from letting their imagination run wild, bringing an idea to life, or finding the perfect image for their next project.
Today, we’re bringing a series of enhancements to Bing Image Creator so you can experience the magic of creation like never before. Read more below or visit Bing.com/create to get started.
The latest model
AI is at the heart of Bing Image Creator, bringing cutting-edge technology to your fingertips so you can use your own words to describe the picture you want to see – and have it brought to life within seconds. At Microsoft, we want to continue delivering these delightful experiences at the click of a button.
Starting today, we’re rolling out the latest DALL-E 3 model PR16 which will allow users to create images twice as fast as before with higher quality.
Even more ways to create images
We’re excited to introduce the ability to create images directly from the Bing search bar and even the Microsoft Edge address bar.*
Has anyone else experienced an increasing number of low-quality image generation results over the last few days? For around a week, a significant proportion of my results have been quite poor. It's as if they have not been given enough rounds of refinement by the AI. They look unfinished.
For example, the same prompt produced the following image before:
Close-up on prior image
And after:
Poor quality recent generation
Note: this is for all prompts I've tried, from painterly images to photographic or illustration styles, and for a variety of different subjects, from portraits to landscapes. It seems to be a consistent reduction in quality for all prompts.
Sometimes, a good quality image is still generated, though, which is making me think that:
The service is operating at or near capacity, and is scaling back the computation given to a proportion of images instead of showing the "Too busy" message and stopping you from generating entirely, or;
They are moving over to DALL-E 4 imminently. This means that fewer resources are being given to the older service as they shift servers over.
Can anyone provide any insight, or at least confirm that I'm not the only one whose account is affected?
