Open AI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence company founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, has fully released its popular AI image generation tool to the public.
The DALL-E program, a portmanteau between Salvador Dali and Pixar's Wall-E, has for months only allowed a select few participants on its waiting list to access it services, which render elaborate AI-produced images based on a simple text prompt.
It has achieved a level of viral fame this year as social media users strive to outdo each other by blending art styles and producing artful or unnerving images. According to OpenAI, over 1.5 million people are using the service to create 2 million images a day.
New users are given 50 credits, each used to generate one image, and can buy more at a price of $15 for 115.
OpenAI gives users exclusive rights to "reproduce and display" the images they generate as long as they follow the content guidelines. This includes for commercial usage, an idea that has grown controversial because the algorithms used to generate images through DALL-E and others like it are developed around millions of copyrighted photos and images.
While not generating much revenue currently, the AI image generation space has grown rapidly in the past year with other companies like London-based Stable Diffusion and S.F.-based Midjourney seeking to overtake DALL-E in popularity and find new ways to monetize the service.
