Microsoft Reverts to Older DALL-E Version After Quality Issues

Users complained primarily about unrealistic human figure rendering and an overall “plastic” appearance of generated images. The PR16 model also struggled with mimicking artistic styles, and when creating graphic elements like logos or banners, it produced blurry text.

This has affected e-commerce business who rely on AI-generated product images and marketing materials for their stores.

Ironically, the new PR16 version was supposed to bring twice the generation speed and higher quality outputs, according to Microsoft’s original statements. However, reality proved otherwise—besides deteriorated quality, there was also an increase in keyword censorship, including those related to anime creation and certain product categories.

Jordi Ribas, Corporate Vice President and Head of Search at Microsoft, confirmed that the company has begun the process of reverting to the previous PR13 version.

“We’ve been able to repro some of the issues reported and plan to revert to PR13 until we can fix them. All Pro users and about 25% of the requests using boosts are now on PR13. The deployment process is very slow unfortunately. It started over a week ago and will take 2-3 more weeks to get to 100%. I’ll keep you posted. ,” Ribas stated.

This gradual rollout means e-commerce businesses might need to temporarily invest in alternative image generation solutions services to maintain their visual marketing standards.

OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E 3, has not yet commented on the situation. It’s unclear whether the problems were caused by the model itself or Microsoft’s implementation, but experts lean towards believing it’s more likely an issue with the PR16 model itself.