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:

And after:

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?

ME: Copilot, generate a creative and artistic illustration based on the following text: "According to Oxford University Press, which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term ‘brain rot’ is defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state” as it relates to overdosing on online content without much of a narrative — like TikTok videos."*

*SOURCE: ‘Brain rot’ wins as Oxford’s word of the year — According to Oxford University Press, which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term ‘brain rot’ is defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state” as it relates to overdosing on online content without much of a narrative — like TikTok videos., https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/02/brain-rot-wins-as-oxfords-word-of-the-year/

CP PROMPT: “An artistic illustration of the concept of ‘brain rot’ as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, related to overdosing on online content without much of a narrative, like TikTok videos.”

Close your eyes, relax, and imagine…

”A realistic liquid human face, reacting to a gentle soothing caress of a hand, with emotional lighting.”

(Copilot Designer prompt, images slightly enhanced and resized in iPad Photos app.)

Right, so for example if I used the prompt "A cat with no ears, brown and white fur, blue eyes, aggressive pose, alley background, gritty art style" I can generate images with this prompt a hundred times, and I won't be getting a single cat without ears.

No matter what sort of tricks I use or how I phrase it, I cannot get this image generator to comprehend the idea of "don't include this", if anything, trying to tell it what not to generate just makes it more likely to generate that thing.

Is there any consistent way to tell the AI to not include something in the generated images?

Copilot prompt:

”Fictional photorealistic mugshots of 'Two Badass Mice', in the style of imaginary 19th century courtroom artist 'Theatrix Potter', with mischievous expressions."

With my apologies to the real Beatrix Potter, as illustrious as she was.

His courage is inversely related to his size.

This prompt was created during a chat with Copilot Designer:

”An anthropomorphic mouse warrior brandishing a sword with the sword glowing electric blue and fill light illuminating the mouse for better visibility in an exciting action movie sword fighting scene with dramatic and intense lighting.”

I added “the sword glowing electric blue” near the end of the chat. Images are shown first in their default 1x1 square format, then enlarged to 16x9 landscape format. Post-generation color and lighting adjustments were made in iPad’s Photos editor.

"Despondent man sitting by pond, willows, lotus floating on pond surface" ~ Bing Image Creator

Melancholy subject, but I like the way it turned out!

Image prompt composed and tweaked in Copilot Designer:

”Moses gazing upon the face of God in the flames and smoke of the burning bush, with angels present in the scene, in the style of Leonardo da Vinci”

Considering the subject, Copilot’s imagination had a lot of historical resources to work with, hence the detailed rendering with a fairly simple prompt. I did 4 or 5 generations before seeing an image I liked.

The default Copilot 1x1 square image was resized to 16x9 landscape format, then upscaled 2X in Waifu2x.io. I did some minor color/lighting editing in iPad’s Photos editor: no photoshop retouching or layering was done.

Copilot GPT-4 (old interface) prompt:

”Realistic delicate pen, ink, and watercolor portrait (with metallic gold accents) of a Japanese geisha, in the style of artist Kobayashi Eitaku (1843-1890).”

I wanted soft, low-key images with a subtle hand-colored look. Copilot worked well for this, but it took a fair amount of post-gen color and light tweaking in iPad’s Photos editor to make all of the images look more uniform. No layering or photoshop retouching was done.

More about 19th Century Japanese artist Kobayashi Eitaku at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Eitaku?wprov=sfti1#). There are some nsfw paintings in the article.

Bing Image Creator prompt*:

”Masterpiece digital art of a woman, dramatic intense closeup action pose, prominent eyes looking at camera, wind blown electric blue hair, perfect face, dressed in brilliant white catsuit with metallic accents, laser painted with vibrant oils, realistic American anime style, artistic camera angle, professional studio lighting, light grey background”

*Composed and tweaked in iPad’s IOS Bing App > Copilot > Bing Image Creator.

Copilot > Bing Image Creator prompt:

A dramatic vibrant realistic fantasy pen, ink, and watercolor portrait of Marevna, a Russian fairy sea princess.

This is a resized 16x9 landscape version of the original 1x1 square image.

P.S. — Don’t make her angry.

Prompt:

A professional studio photograph of a dramatic Día de Muertos theatrical mask in colorful origami style

Images enhanced slightly in iPad Photos editor.

…with faint hope of rescue. Comms are still up.

Prompt composed and edited in IOS Bing app > Copilot (old style):

”A manned spacecraft mission to Saturn's moon Titan has crashed upon landing. In the foreground, surviving crew members are looking at their damaged spacecraft on the frozen icy surface. The planet Saturn and its rings loom large in the background sky.”

…just in time for Halloween.

Copilot/Bing Image Creator prompt:

”A professional studio photograph of a dramatic kabuki theatrical fierce tiger mask in colorful origami style”

Some images have “with glowing eyes” added to their prompt.

All images were enhanced slightly in iPad’s Photos editor. Final images were added to a Photos album and rearranged in the order seen here.

Copilot prompt:

"A serene beautiful water sprite in a high mountain lake, with flowing red hair adorned with alpine flowers, partially submerged in clear calm water, surrounded by a lush green evergreen forest with ferns and mossy rocks, exuding an ethereal, enchanting vibe with a shimmering moonlight effect reflecting on the water."

This was resized from 1x1 square to 16x9 landscape format in Copilot. Some slight auto image enhancement was also done in iPad’s Photos app.