Bing DALL-E 3 Users Left Frustrated Because of ‘Microsoft’s Censorship’
Users of DALL-E 3 have been raging against Microsoft for the computer giant’s heavy-handed censorship of the AI image generator.
After DALL-E 3 was launched last month, Microsoft incorporated the latest generative AI technology into Bing, its search engine.
DALL-3 is owned and operated by OpenAI, the same company behind ChatGPT. Both DALL-E and ChatGPT have been integrated into Microsoft’s search tool but after some began to use Bing to create questionable AI images such as “Mickey Mouse doing 9/11”, the companies have moved to censor what DALL-E can produce on Bing.
An article from 404 Media played on a similar theme with the author using Bing to generate a picture of Spongebob flying a plane toward the Twin Towers.
i wonder how disney feels about microsoft building a bing app that generates ai pics of mickey mouse hijacking a plane on 9/11 pic.twitter.com/Y61Ag19J3D
— 𖤐 Sage 𖤐 🏳️⚧️ (@Transgenderista) October 5, 2023
But it appears that Microsoft and OpenAI may have gone too far nerfing DALL-E because now users are reporting that they can’t generate inoffensive images.
“Who else completely lost interest in Dall-E 3 after the censorship? I wasn’t even using it for weird stuff,” writes one disgruntled Reddit user.
Many Redditors agree with one user reportedly being locked out for requesting an image of “a cat with a cowboy hat and boots.”
Meanwhile, another user showed the series of images he made with DALL-E before he was banned. While the images are strange, they don’t appear offensive in the way “Mickey Mouse doing 9/11” is.
“I asked it to generate people dancing on a cake, it gave me a woman in a ballerina dress standing next to a cake. I described the image back to it in my next prompt — blocked,” writes another person of their experience.
Jez Corden from Windows Central, who first broke the story, says that “It’s arguable that Bing and Open AI have gone too far with censorship when truly innocuous prompts return negative feedback. Last week, I was able to generate a range of cartoony zombie apocalypse fan art, but this week, that’s too ‘controversial’ for Bing, resulting in blocked prompts.”
AI image generators have tried banning certain subjects before but there is usually a workaround. Microsoft seems to have taken the strictest approach of any AI image generator thus far.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
