‘Say goodbye to Midjourney and graphic designers’: Internet speculates on DALL·E 3 impact

Last week OpenAI teased the tech world with a glimpse of the third version of its art generator, DALL·E 3, with many billing it as a rival to the current leaders in AI art generation.

But what is its impact on the design world likely to be?

Not currently available to the public, the upgrade promises to take some of the pain out of prompting as well as boasting an ability to understand nuances and detail for accurate image translation.

Sam Altman’s white-hot start-up announced recently that DALL·E 3 was now in research preview and will be available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers next month, via the API, and in Labs later this fall.

The announcement has been met with stirring anticipation and speculation around the possibility of a generative ‘battle of the bots’.

Some commentators have speculated that this could spell the end of rival art gen platform Midjourney.

The small San Francisco-based research lab produces an AI that generates images from natural language descriptions (prompts) like its rivals DALL-E 2 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. Midjourney users typically use Discord bot commands for prompts.

OpenAI claims that one of the main advantages in its next iteration of DALL-E is that it uses ChatGPT to help fill in prompts.

Via ChatGPT, subscribers to OpenAI’s premium ChatGPT plans, ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise, can type in a request for an image and hone it through conversations with the chatbot — receiving the results directly within the chat app.

In statement the company explained : “Modern text-to-image systems have a tendency to ignore words or descriptions, forcing users to learn prompt engineering. DALL·E 3 represents a leap forward in our ability to generate images that exactly adhere to the text you provide.”

Reaction to the release on X (formerly Twitter) included statements such as “Goodbye Midjourney” and predictions that DALL·E 3 will “destroy competitors”.

DALL-E 3 has just been announced, and it will destroy competitors.

Not only it will be the most advanced image-gen AI available.

But its combination with ChatGPT will offer unlimited power.

You basically don’t need to prompt anymore, just chat with the model until you get the… pic.twitter.com/cSqyGud138

— Jérémy Grandillon (@JGrandillon) September 21, 2023

Goodbye Midjourney

— Nikon Sevast (@sevast_nikon) September 20, 2023

Bindu Reddy, CEO of AI outfit Abacusai, displayed her excitement on X stating, “DALL·E 3 is going to be a HUGE HIT given that you can generate images with text and use GPT-4 for prompting!”

DALL-E 3 is going to be a HUGE HIT given that you can generate images with text and use GPT-4 for prompting!

It’s happening – AI models chatting and instructing other AI models 😍😍😍 pic.twitter.com/Jxa8HFIRnA

— Bindu Reddy (@bindureddy) September 21, 2023

Amid the excitement, X users are expressing reignited fears about job loss, with one user saying, “I find it hard to believe I’ll need to hire a graphic designer.”

Nevertheless, they cheerily added that while “the nature of work will change, it’s not the end of society ­— only society as we know it”.

I don’t think people understand just how quickly many jobs will be replaced by AI.

Ex: Midjourney and DALL-E 3 are now good enough that I find it hard to believe I’ll need to hire a graphic designer.

Knowledge work is going to have a reckoning.

— Mckay Wrigley (@mckaywrigley) September 20, 2023

While users await its release, they can still access its predecessor, DALL·E 2, for free via the Bing Image Creator interface, with DALL·E 3 soon to be rolled out.

But does the current incarnation of DALL-E cut the mustard in a professional publishing environment?

With Christmas in mind (well, there’s no harm in forward planning) TechInformed attempted to use DALL·E 2 to create some fun iterations of our logo. The results were, interesting.

We fed Bing an image of our logo and asked it to recreate it using candy canes. These were the best of a very bad bunch.

We will be sure to update you with the DALL·E 3 improved versions this side of Christmas, to see if it lives up to the hype.

For more articles about AI by TechInformed, take a look here!