• DALL-E 2 has been integrated into Microsoft new Designer application, as well as Bing.
• Microsoft Designer will be free with more premium features locked behind a Microsoft 365 subscription.
• Microsoft is working with Open AI to ensure the tool isn’t corrupted, like Tay.

Ahead of its Ignite conference Microsoft showed off a bevy of new Surface notebooks, but there were a few software announcements alongside those unveilings.

One of the more exciting announcements here was that of a new application called Microsoft Designer. Described as software that will help users “create stunning social media posts, invitations, digital postcards, graphics, and more, all in a flash” that’s the least interesting thing about it.

“Microsoft Designer is powered by AI technology, including DALL∙E 2 by OpenAI, which means you’re able to instantly generate a variety of designs with minimal effort,” Microsoft said in a blog post.

The DALL-E 2 image creation artificial intelligence from OpenAI allows a user to turn text into images. You’ve likely seen images like this online before most notably when one of these images won a fine art competition in September. It’s an incredibly enthralling piece of kit and you can check out more about it here.

The benefit of this integration with Microsoft Designer, says the firm, is that users will be able to create original content faster.

So how much is this going to cost?

Microsoft is currently in the process of taking sign-ups for a free web preview of Designer here. This preview won’t include all the feature Microsoft has planned but more will be added over time. Once Designer is ready for a broader release, it will be launched as both a free application and as part of Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions with more premium features.

That’s not the only integration of DALL-E 2 in a Microsoft product.

Image Creator from Microsoft Bing will help you find an image you’re searching for, even if it doesn’t exist. Yes, this does mean you’ll have to use Microsoft Bing but if you ask us, being able to generate original images that match exactly what we’re looking for is a decent trade off.

This product appears to be freely accessible from the Image Creator tab that will appear within the Bing Images search but we don’t have a clear indication as of time of writing.

Didn’t Microsoft give the public AI once before?

Yes, yes it did. That AI was Tay and it took a few hours for the internet to just destroy it.

This time, however, things are a bit different. For one, Microsoft isn’t just unleashing Designer to the masses all at once. Rather, it’s taking a measured approach and importantly, working with OpenAI.

“To help prevent DALL∙E 2 from delivering inappropriate results across the Designer app and Image Creator, we are working together with our partner OpenAI, who developed DALL∙E 2, to take the necessary steps and will continue to evolve our approach,” the firm said.

“For example, OpenAI removed explicit sexual and violent content from the dataset used to train the model, and Microsoft deployed filters to limit the generation of images that violate content policy,” said Microsoft.

One other aspect of the software that Microsoft has noted needs work is in how diverse results are. The firm says that, “some prompts to DALL∙E 2 may surface biases embedded in the training data,” but it has applied technology to address this. Importantly, it’s an issue Microsoft is aware of already and it’s working to improve it.