DALL-E Users Can Now Upload and Edit Real Human Faces. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

As AI image generators go, OpenAI has taken a relatively conservative route to realistic human faces, likely in order to avoid unintentionally facilitating the spread of deepfaked pornographic images and other graphic content already uploaded by less restrictive alternatives like Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion.

Monday’s move builds off of previous experimentation with human-like faces at OpenAI. In June, the company said it would let researchers begin generating images of realistic looking humans belonging to non-real humans. Though these images don’t run into the same consent issues as authentic human faces since they don’t involve actual living people, OpenAI similarly put up guardrails to avoid DALL-E spitting out a cesspool of unwanted images or “deceptive content.”

Deceptive or not, many of the recent images created by users and posted online are nonetheless pretty creepy, with the photorealistic images of fabricated people straddling right along the furthest edge of the uncanny valley.

Updated 9/20/22 11:27 a.m. ET: Added email details from OpenAI.