On Thursday, OpenAI announced the introduction of an API for its DALL-E image synthesis model that will allow developers to easily integrate its AI image generation technology into their apps. DALL-E, currently available as a standalone commercial service, allows people to generate novel 1024×1024 images from text descriptions called « prompts. » The generated images can vary in style from photorealistic to abstract—and many styles in between.
OpenAI’s new API allows software developers to feed an image prompt and other parameters into OpenAI’s DALL-E engine over the Internet. OpenAI then generates the image on its servers and returns the image for display in the requesting app. (An API is a programming interface that allows different programs to talk to each other.)
Usage of the API requires registration with OpenAI and a private API key that allows access to the DALL-E generator. Additionally, OpenAI levies a fee for each image generated depending on image resolution. Images that are 1024×1024 cost $0.02 an image, 512×512 images cost $0.018 per image, and 256×256 images cost $0.016 per image.