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.

When DALL-E first launched, it lived on its standalone website; since then, it has moved to ChatGPT. The move came with many benefits, including being able to ask the AI chatbot for an image you want in the same interface where you're already chatting about something else, thereby eliminating the need for constant context switching.

The model can now use full conversations to generate images, understanding the context to design the image you want. It can also create better text in images, focus on smaller det