Bing’s Image Creator got a huge boost in power recently, thanks to the new Dall-E 3 algorithm. The quality of the pictures generated is exponentially better than previous versions, although it comes with some controversies.

Disney was recently approached to comment after Yahoo! ran a story on how Bing was able to generate images of “Mickey Mouse causing 9/11.” Indeed, the first few days of Dall-E 3 on Bing were something uniquely typical of this type of tech. Microsoft is no stranger to this type of controversy. The firm has been in hot water for previous AI efforts after a previous chatbot iteration was manipulated by users into becoming racist.

Guardrails are important for this type of tech, which has the potential to generate not just offensive images, but also defamatory, misleading, or even illegal material. However, some users think that Microsoft may have gone just a little bit too far.

…Bing Image Creator has a “surprise me” randomizer button, by which it creates an image of its own choosing to present to you. However, Bing Image Creator is also censoring its own creations. I was able to reproduce the situation myself quite easily, roughly 30% of the time.

…Right now, 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. If you get too many warnings, you can even be banned from the service, which seems silly in of itself when the guidelines are fairly opaque and vague.

If Bing and Windows Copilot by extension can only generate sanitized results, it defeats the point of the tool kit. Human society and life isn’t always “brand safe,” and Microsoft’s squeamish attitude to even the vaguest hints of controversy will undermine its efforts to mainstream this sort of technology. You can’t revise history, sadly, if you want to maintain accuracy.

Read more:

Corden, J. (2023, October 8). Bing Dall-E 3 image creation was great for a few days, but now Microsoft has predictably lobotomized it 🥴. Windows Central. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/bing/bing-dall-e-3-image-creation-was-great-for-a-few-days-but-now-microsoft-has-predictably-lobotomized-it