Ahead of the holidays, Microsoft said it upgraded the AI model behind Bing Image Creator, the AI-powered image editing tool built into the company’s Bing search engine. Microsoft promises that the new model – the latest version of the OpenAI DALL-E 3 model, codenamed “PR16” – will allow users to create images “twice as fast as before” with “higher quality.” But it was not sent. Complaints quickly flooded X and Reddit. “Our beloved DALL-E is gone,” said one Redditor. “I’m using ChatGPT now because Bing is no longer useful to me,” wrote another. The blow comes as Microsoft says it will restore the previous model to Bing Image Creator until it fixes the problem. bring back old dalle 3! picture quality is better in older models. like this picture for example. the picture made by the new model sucks 🙁 pic.twitter.com/BjIM8MS4ng — ze ᡣ𐭩ྀིྀི (@riegrowl) December 28, 2024 “We’ve been able [reproduce] some problems are reported, and plan to return to it [DALL-E 3] PR13 until we can fix it,” said Jordi Ribas, head of search at Microsoft, in a post on X Tuesday afternoon. “The deployment process is very unfortunate. It started over a week ago and it took another 2-3 weeks to get to 100%. So what’s wrong? It is difficult to compare model output from anecdotal reports, especially if the demand is not standardized. But many users say the PR16 tends to make images look less realistic — and “lifeless.” Mayank Parmar, writing for Windows Latest, noted that the images produced by the PR16 lacked detail and polish, and looked oddly cartoonish. I don’t know who you are kidding with this. DALL-E is objectively worse than before this “update” and you are being outdone by other companies like Google. It’s really night and day comparing image quality now just a few months ago pic.twitter.com/EdSdk7aign — outward (@roccynoxy) December 19, 2024 This isn’t the first time an image model that allegedly passed an internal inspection wasn’t well received by the public. Back in February, Google was forced to pause its AI chatbot Gemini’s ability to create pictures of people after users complained about inaccurate histories. These errors illustrate how difficult it is to measure model improvements in the real world. According to Ribas, Microsoft’s benchmarking found the PR16’s quality to be “better on average” compared to previous Bing Image Creator models. Whatever internal metrics the company uses, it seems clear that it doesn’t match most people’s preferences.
Microsoft is rolling back the Bing Image Creator model after users complained about degraded quality
