Open AI, developers of the AI text-to-image generator DALL-E 2, have just announced a new feature for the app called “outpainting”. It allows users to extend existing images and works of art with AI-generated content. It’s pretty exciting, and hugely expands the capabilities of the tool.
DALL-E 2 is one of the most popular text-to-image generators available at the moment. With more than a million users, it’s no wonder that content created by it seems to be everywhere. (A lot of other text-to-image generators are either in a closed beta, like Stable Diffusion, are not available to the public, like Google’s Imagen, or are much more limited in scope, like Craiyon.)
DALL-E 2 takes a text prompt, like “an astronaut riding a horse in the style of Andy Warhol,” and generates nine 1,024-pixel by 1,024-pixel images that illustrate it. It uses a process called “diffusion” where it starts with randomly generated noise and then edits it to match the salient features of the prompt as closely as possible.
Until now, users were limited with the size and aspect ratio of what they could create with DALL-E 2. The AI program could only generate 1,024-pixel by 1,024-pixel squares—anything larger or a different shape was out of the question. It was possible to use a feature called “inpainting” to modify details in existing artworks, but to actually create a bigger canvas involved manually stitching different sections together using an app like Photoshop. (For different aspect ratios, you could crop your image, but that reduced the overall resolution.)
Now with outpainting, the only limit users face—other than the content filters—are the number of credits they have. (Everyone gets 50 free generation credits during their first month and 15 to u