OpenAI starts allowing users to modify faces with DALL-E 2

After initially disabling the feature, OpenAI today announced that customers with access to DALL-E 2 can upload people's faces for editing using the build system imagery powered by AI. Previously, OpenAI only allowed users to work with and share photorealistic faces and prohibited uploading any photos that might represent a real person, including photos of celebrities and public figures.

OpenAI says improvements to its security system have made face-editing functionality possible by "minimizing the potential for harm" from deepfakes as well as attempts to create sexual, political and violent content. In an email to customers, the company wrote:

"Many of you have told us that you miss using DALL-E to imagine outfits and hairstyles on your own and to edit backgrounds for family photos. A reconstructive surgeon told us said he used DALL-E to help his patients visualize results. And the filmmakers told us they wanted to be able to edit images of scenes with people to help speed up their creative processes… [We] built new detection and response techniques to stop abuse."

The change in policy does not necessarily open the floodgates. OpenAI's terms of service will continue to prohibit uploading photos of people without their consent or images that users don't have rights to, though it's unclear to what extent the company has always been consistent in applying these policies.

In any case, this will be a real test of OpenAI's filtering technology, which some customers have complained about in the past to be overzealous and somewhat inaccurate. Deepfakes come in many forms, from fake vacation photos to presidents of war-torn countries. Addressing each emerging form of abuse will be a never-ending battle, in some cases with very high stakes.

There is no doubt that OpenAI, which has the backing of Microsoft and notable venture capital firms including Khosla Ventures, wants to avoid the controversy associated with Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, an image generation system available in an open source format without any restrictions. . As TechCrunch recently wrote, it wasn't long before Stable Diffusion - which can also edit face images - was being used by some to create pornographic, non-consensual deepfakes of celebrities like Emma Watson.

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So far, OpenAI has positioned itself as a buttoned-up, brand-friendly alternative to Boundless Stability AI. And with the constraints related to the new face editing functionality for DALL-E 2, the company maintains the status quo.

DALL-E 2 remains in invite-only beta. At the end of August, OpenAI announced that more than one million people were using the service.