Building the New Bing Image Creator

As we announced earlier this week, with Bing Image Creator you can now turn words into pictures to truly express your imagination, giving you access to infinite image possibilities right from within Bing. A vivid dream, a birthday invitation to fit a unique theme, the new concept you’re trying to land at work. These are personal and specific. These are things that require a unique image to express your unique idea. Even better is that you can ask for these pictures in the flow of your conversation with the new Bing chat.



Much like in my first blog about Building the New Bing, I’d like to share some of the thinking and the tech behind this magic, while providing some tips for how to best use the feature in the product.

Image Creator uses OpenAI’s latest DALL·E model, a powerful language model that can generate coherent and diverse texts on almost any topic. Except, instead of taking text as input and producing a text as output, DALL·E takes a text as input and produces an image as output. It uses a technique called self-attention to learn the relationships between text and images.

The results are realistic images that can combine concepts, attributes, and styles. For example, you can ask Bing Image Creator to draw a “cat wearing a hat and sunglasses” or a “surreal painting of a pineapple” and it will generate images that match your request. You can include a significant number of details in your query like in the image below. For the best results, you’ll want to include a subject, details and the scene.



Prompt: create a realistic photo of a distinguished rhino in a 3 piece suit drinking a cup of tea

Integrating the new Bing with the power of Image Creator further unlocks the potential of both of these tools. I find that it’s more intuitive and fun to create images iteratively within a Bing chat session, rather than directly in the Image Creator vertical. Plus, there are scenarios where it is so helpful to be able to create within the context of a chat session, for instance creating a character for the bedtime story you just wrote.

As you may recall, we announced Image Creator availability in a few markets back in October. So why did we wait so long to roll it out more broadly? Well, there are a few reasons:

• We wanted to test and learn, especially regarding the implications for responsible AI. It’s important to note that in addition to generating AI images with the latest DALL·E models from OpenAI, we prohibit the use of Image Creator to produce content that can inflict harm on individuals or society. To achieve this, we block certain prompts and images, and we’ve used the last few months to help inform this approach. I realize this may result in over blocking some images sometimes which can be frustrating, and that’s why we’ve implemented an appeal process and will continue to improve our classifiers.
• We were expecting an improved model from OpenAI. Their latest model has dramatically increased the quality of the images with more detail and understands more visual concepts, which leads to more relevant results.
• Since last October, we have announced the new Bing, and it immediately became clear how intuitively Image Creator could fit into the chat experience. We were able to enhance the Prometheus model by providing instructions and examples of how to interact with Image Creator in a multi-turn fashion.

Of course, even with all of these adjustments, we are still learning and iterating so please keep providing your valuable feedback.

I’m delighted that Image Creator is now available to try for free in English everywhere that the new Bing is available. Here’s how:

For those in the new Bing preview:

1. Go to bing.com and go to the chat experience, and select the Creative conversation style.
2. Ask Bing to create an image for you. The more descriptive the better. For instance "create an image of an astronaut riding a skateboard, digital art" will create better images than “create an image of an astronaut.” Remember to type the query only in English at this point.
3. Every query gives you up to 4 images to choose from.
4. You can download or share your images and encourage others to give it a try.

If you’re not yet in the preview of the new Bing, you can still access Bing Image Creator by going to bing.com/create.

And if you’re not already signed up, here’s another reason to start using Microsoft Rewards. As a Microsoft Rewards member you can further accelerate your creative power by using points to boost the speed at which your image creations are generated.

As someone who speaks daily in my non-native language, I’m very familiar with the challenges of trying to fully articulate myself. It’s the same feeling you get when you can’t find a picture that captures exactly what you want to express. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m captivated by the potential of Image Creator and how it empowers us to become our own visual storytellers.

Even though the internet is vast, I bet you can think of a time when you couldn’t quite find the right image. In a way, Image Creator infinitely expands the Bing image index since, if you can’t find an existing image, you can create it. I can’t wait to see what you all create with Bing Image Creator. We are only at the very beginning of our journey, and I'm excited to be a part of this new era in search in partnership with all of you.

Jordi Ribas
Corporate Vice President, Search & AI