DALL·E 3

• DALL·E 3 pros: Incredibly easy to use; included with ChatGPT Plus, so you get a lot of AI for your money
• DALL·E 3 cons: ChatGPT controls can be hit and miss; no longer has a free trial; $20/month is pricey if you don’t want GPT with it

DALL·E 3 is arguably the biggest name in AI image generators—and with good reason. Its predecessor, DALL·E 2, was the first AI-powered image generator that was good enough to create wildly interesting images and was widely available to enough people to go viral.

And while DALL·E 2 is still available through its web app and API, DALL·E 3, which you can use through ChatGPT, is a significant improvement. For any given prompt, it produces more interesting, more realistic, and more consistent results. Previously, it felt like OpenAI was falling behind its competitors with AI image generators, but DALL·E 3 has brought it right back into the race.

The biggest thing is that DALL·E 3

is ridiculously simple to use. Tell ChatGPT what you want to see, and within a few moments, you’ll have four AI-generated variations to choose from. It uses GPT’s understanding of language to expand your prompts, so each result will be distinct.

Unfortunately, DALL·E is no longer free to try out. If you’re a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you can use it as much as you like, subject to GPT-4’s 50 messages every three hours limit. Or, if you’re happy to stick with DALL·E 2, you can get 115 credits for $15—that’s around $0.13 per prompt or $0.0325 per image variation. While it’s a lot more basic, at that price, it’s still worth considering.

Right now, DALL·E 3 doesn’t have all the same features as DALL·E 2. You can ask ChatGPT to make changes, but you can’t do too much otherwise. Sometimes this feels like magic, where ChatGPT will do exactly what you request. Other times, it’s like working with an overeager intern who’s a touch too happy to do their own thing. 

While DALL·E 2 produces more basic results,

it still has some powerful features. The image editor (which is also in beta) enables you to add additional generated frames, so you can expand an image, whether you generated it using DALL·E 2 or uploaded it. This technique, called out-painting, means you can create larger works of AI art. There’s also an eraser, so you can remove bits of an image and replace them with AI-generated elements (this technique is called in-painting). These features don’t perfectly map to DALL·E 3 yet, though you can ask ChatGPT to expand your image or remove things you don’t like, which can give you a similar effect.

In addition to DALL·E 3 through ChatGPT and the DALL·E 2 web app, OpenAI offers an API, which allows developers to build apps that integrate with the two DALL·E models (though support for DALL·E 3 is still forthcoming). Because of that, you can connect DALL·E to Zapier to do things like automatically create images from Google Forms or HubSpot responses—or any other apps you use. Or you can use it to automate your art inspiration.

DALL·E pricing: DALL·E 3 is included as part of ChatGPT Plus at $20/month; DALL·E 2 costs $15 for 115 image credits. API pricing is more complex, but starts from $0.016/image.