Bing Image Creator has been the subject of controversy recently, as it was upgraded (to Dall-E 3), but then misused to knock up pics that were tasteless and offensive – following which, Microsoft applied some strict censorship.
The move was far from surprising, given some of the controversial images posted – like the infamous ‘Mickey Mouse’ picture shared online – but the level of censorship imposed was an overreaction.
To the point where what seemed perfectly reasonable image generation requests have been denied in numerous cases, and with its random pic option, Bing AI is even censoring its own creations (a bizarre situation to say the least).
Microsoft has evidently been taking in feedback from the community of Bing chatbot users, and is in the process of tweaking Bing Image Creator to dial back that censorship to be a bit more relaxed.
Windows Central spotted that Mikhail Parakhin, who is Chief Executive, Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft, replied to a user on X (formerly Twitter) who complained that they were getting images blocked (due to unsafe content being detected). This was happening to the extent that the user could no longer actually use the image creation facility, and as the they observed, the safety department for Bing AI has seemingly gone overboard.
Parakhin acknowledged that Microsoft has received reports of issues like this and that the company is delving into the reasons why, and moreover, improving the moderation system.
That sounds very much like the strictness of the censorship applied is set to be taken down at least a notch (though from the reports online we’ve seen, it seems like a bump down several notches might be a good idea).
Parakhin’s tweet came from two days ago, and at the time of writing, there are still very recent complaints from other users on X that the image creator is calling pretty much every picture it generates unsafe and blocking it.
Of course, changes to the Bing AI won’t happen quickly – doubtless there’s a lot of complexity and knots to untangle behind the scenes – but we can keep our fingers crossed that maybe something will happen to remedy the situation next week.
Meanwhile, if you use Bing Image Creator, it’ll remain rather frustrating that the feature got a really impressive upgrade very recently – Dall-E 3 is much more powerful than its predecessor – but you can’t actually use the thing properly right now.
Watch this space, but it’s also interesting to note that today, Google has implemented the functionality to create images right from the search bar (if you’re running Search Generative Experience, or SGE).
