DALL-E 2 Reaches One Million Users With New Outpainting Feature
OpenAI's DALL-E 2 image generator surpasses one million users and launches a new Outpainting feature that expands existing images using text prompts. The tool carefully matches the original artwork's shadows, reflections, and textures to create seamless extensions.
OpenAI introduces a new feature called Outpainting for all DALL-E 2 users, allowing them to expand existing photos and paintings through simple text prompts. The tool analyzes the original image's shadows, reflections, and textures to maintain visual context, meaning users can easily add new narrative elements to any artwork directly in their desktop browser.
This technology shows unique potential when applied to classical historical paintings, as demonstrated by AI artists who expanded famous works by Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Vermeer. However, the feature still struggles with rendering complex human hands, a common challenge in AI image generation that OpenAI appears to navigate by intentionally cropping out problematic areas in its official examples.
The feature rollout accompanies a major milestone for OpenAI, as DALL-E 2 officially surpasses one million users in just 2.5 months compared to the two years it took GPT-3 to reach the same mark. This rapid growth establishes DALL-E 2 as OpenAI's most successful commercial product to date, though the company now faces fresh competition from the recently released open-source alternative Stable Diffusion.