OpenAI’s New DALL-E Edit Feature Reveals How Far AI Has to Go

OpenAI confronted a common problem for AI image generators when it broadly released a new edit feature for ChatGPT’s DALL-E this month. Oftentimes, AI image generators misunderstand what you want to create, so OpenAI’s new tool allows you to highlight sections of your image, and change them to your specifications. The tool sounds great in theory, but in practice, it leaves something to be desired.

Gizmodo ran a few tests of DALL-E’s new edit tool, which is very similar to Adobe Photoshop’s generative fill feature, Firefly. While OpenAI’s DALL-E is one of the best AI image generators on the market, the edit tool is somewhat disappointing. Ideally, a photo editing tool should enable you to change the things that are wrong in an image. We largely found that DALL-E’s edit tool refuses or simply fails to produce what you ask. In some cases, it completely ruins the photo.

The tool highlights a key limiting factor for AI image generators: they have no idea what the hell they’re making. At one point when using DALL-E’s edit feature, ChatGPT told me, “Unfortunately, I can’t directly edit images or alter specific elements within them.” That’s because the AI doesn’t know what it made. It can’t tell if there’s a foreground, a background, or even what a sign it created says.

So the edit feature is not really “editing” the photo at all. It’s actually editing your prompt, and generating a new photo each time in the area you specify. The result is that DALL-E’s editing feature does not allow you the precision and control that you’d expect out of an edit tool.

You have to understand DALL-E’s limitations in order to use the edit tool. To get the most out of it, you really need to use clear instructions and only ask for fairly simple changes. Putting a birthday hat on someone, turning a scene from day to night, or other simple changes routinely worked in our tests, though more complicated changes didn’t.

To be fair, this is the case for all editing tools on AI image generators at the moment. They are generating something new each time, and that can distort your image. While the editor works in limited circumstances, it doesn’t offer the customization you might hope for. Here are our test runs with DALL-E’s image editor.