Microsoft has had to roll back its latest update to its Bing Image Generation system, which installed the latest iteration of OpenAI’s Dall-E model, called PR16, after Bing users vociferously complained about a decline in image quality.
Since the launch of Bing Image Creator last spring, users have generated billions of images with text prompts. I'm pleased to share our latest updates to enhance your creative experience. Starting today, we’re rolling out the latest DALL-E 3 model PR16, which will create images… pic.twitter.com/3p9HsYMlr6
— Jordi Ribas (@JordiRib1) December 18, 2024
When Microsoft first announced the update late last year, the company promised the new model would be “twice as fast as before and with higher quality.” The company’s head of Search, Jordi Ribas, argues that Microsoft’s internal benchmarking tests determined the quality of PR16-generated images to be “a bit better on average” than the previous Dall-E PR13’s outputs. That is not what users have seen. One commenter on the Bing subreddit lamented, “The DALLE [sic] we used to love, is gone forever,” because the two images below are apparently different enough to warrant such outrage? Looks scary.
In response to the outcry, Ribas announced Tuesday that the company will roll back Bing’s underlying image generation model to the previous version until it can work out the quality issues with PR16. That could take a couple of weeks, however.
“We’ve been able to [reproduce] some of the issues reported, and plan to revert to PR13 until we can fix them,” Ribas wrote in a post on X. “The deployment process is very slow unfortunately. It started over a week ago and will take 2-3 more weeks to get to 100%.”
Microsoft and OpenAI are not alone in their image generator woes. In February 2024, Google had to temporarily disable Gemini’s image model after it began returning racially offensive depictions of people of color, such as black Nazis.
