OpenAI announced today that users with access to DALLE-2 can upload people’s faces to edit using the AI-powered-image-generating system. The AI innovator had disabled this capability initially, only allowing the users to work and share photorealistic faces. 

It had previously banned the upload of any picture that might depict a real person, prominent celebrities or public figures. The company claims that improvements to its safety system made the face-editing feature possible by “minimizing the potential of harm” from deepfakes as well as attempts to create political and violent content. 

An excerpt from the email to customers read: 

“Many of you have told us that you miss using DALL-E to dream up outfits and hairstyles on yourselves and edit the backgrounds of family photos. A reconstructive surgeon told us that he’d been using DALL-E to help his patients visualize results. And filmmakers have told us that they want 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 misuse.”

The firm claims that the terms of service will continue to prohibit uploading pictures of people without their consent or images that users have no rights to. With DALL-E 2—which remains in an invite-only beta phase—OpenAI announced in late August that over a million people use its services. 

OpenAI conducts research in the AI domain with the goal of promoting and developing AI that benefits humanity as a whole. The organisation was established in San Francisco in late 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other investors who collectively pledged US$1 billion.