The arrival of OpenAI's DALL-E 2 in the spring of 2022 marked a turning point in AI, when text-to-image generation suddenly became accessible to a select group of users, creating a community of digital explorers who experienced wonder and controversy as the technology automated the act of visual creation.

OpenAI says that ChatGPT users have generated hundreds of millions of new photos using the company's upgraded image-generation tool.

Microsoft is set to get a major AI update and is preparing its server capacity to support the next iteration of OpenAI’s models. As OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman has previously indicated the brand will soon release the GPT-4.5 large language model in the coming weeks, the Verge has reported that the new model could be available “as early as next week.”