I have been waiting forever (okay, a couple of months) for Bing Image Creator to show up in Canada. It’s always been teasing me with a “Not yet available in your area” on its home screen… and yes, I kept the Bing Image Creator page as one of my pinned tabs in Edge so I’d know as so as it was available. And that day was today!
When you first visit Bing Image Creator at https://www.bing.com/create you see the option to type in free text and then click on CREATE. (There is a surprise me button, but it just puts in random stuff into the search field.)
Now, I think you will need a Microsoft Account to get into Create (you can add a “Microsoft Account Layer” to any email by visiting https://signup.live.com/signup and typing in your current email address. Otherwise, any XBox, Live, Outlook.com would already have an existing Microsoft Account tied to it. Anyways, back to the magic!
So, I tried “Mario (from Super Mario) but as a cowboy”
So first of all, I was pretty impressed with the quality of the images (especially the top row!) So much so, I thought I better do a reverse image search in case Bing was just pulling existing images. But no…
The other thing I noticed was the weird text in the lower left image — and I think it really clarified what I noticed in other trial images. You can see some “mind” that is trying to make sense of pictures, images, words and not quite making sense of it. You’ll ask it to do something and it gets it wrong, but wrong in a really understandable way.
So I asked for “A Canadian Lumberjack holding an axe in a forest of tall pine trees” and you can see that Bing gets it almost right.
But if I clarify “holding an axe over his shoulder” it gets it better:
Bing Image Create also does a nice job of mimicking existing artists, viz, the Burlington Ontario Lift Bridge in the style of Rembrandt:
Or Manet:
or Pollock (which is really interesting because you can see the Pollock, but you can also see the bridge and it’s usually hard to see the thing in a Pollock painting).
As with all things AI, this will move quickly now that it’s available and the possibilities are endless. I look forward to the new creations.
