Adapting to technology, trends, and customer needs is an integral part of marketing in today's fast-paced world.

So as a marketer, how do you balance them all at once?

We know it’s challenging to keep up with the changes and that’s why we look to embrace what’s ahead.

The talk of the town is, of course, Artificial Intelligence (AI), right?

You must have read a gazillion articles and memes on Chat GPT because of its cool features and how it can help with your marketing materials.

Now imagine creating art out of thin air, isn’t that amazing?

In this blog post, we are going to talk about DALL-E 2, its functions, and how you can use it to improve brand visuals and boost your marketing efforts.

What is DALL-E 2?

DALL-E is an AI image generator from text launched by Open AI, the company that introduced Chat GPT. 

The name DALL-E is a combination of the artist Salvador Dali’s last name and Pixar’s popular robot character, WALL-E. DALL-E uses GPT-3 which is an autoregressive language model that allows a computer to understand the written human text.  

A year after its launch, DALL-E 2 was introduced in 2022 with more advanced features. 

DALL-E 2 can understand written text, connect it with existing concepts, and produce original visuals. It also picks up the details of an existing picture and modifies the pattern to resemble the same picture in higher quality using a technique known as "diffusion". This AI-image generator tool creates different versions of the written text, and you can choose the one you like the most. 

Highlights of DALL-E 2

Compared to DALL-E 1, DALL-E 2 has upgraded majorly which makes it a powerful tool for image generation.

1. Generates high-resolution images

The earlier version of DALL-E could only render images in a cartoonish way. However, DALL-E 2 produces images that almost look real. These images are more detailed and provide higher-resolution pictures.

2. Facilitates outpainting

Outpainting helps users to expand the borders of the image by adding neat visual elements. It creates new composition to the original image. With the new process, developers at Open AI could explore DALL-E’s different strengths and capabilities.

3. Easy to edit and retouch

“Inpainting” is made simpler by introducing DALL-E 2. It can make realistic edits to existing images from text. It can add and remove elements without changing the other elements like shadows, reflections, and textures.

4. Increased variety

DALL-E 2 has a larger dataset than DALL-E 1, including more diverse and complex objects and backdrops. This means that DALL-E 2 can generate a wider range of images, from simple objects to complex scenes, and can do so with greater accuracy.

How does DALL-E 2 work in marketing?

Having DALL-E 2 in your marketing toolkit helps you in various ways. It can bring new ideas and a fresh perspective to your team’s creative process. 

DALL-E 2 is a great way to create visuals for your marketing campaigns and collaterals. It could be used by marketers and advertisers to generate high-quality images for campaigns. Also, you can create realistic product images, such as images of suitcases in different tourist destinations.

Most importantly, it helps provide a first draft for designers just like Chat GPT does for writers. This AI-image generator tool simply enhances their work.

Once you start using the tool, the potential you can tap into will be beyond your imagination. 

Applications of DALL-E 2 in marketing

Let’s learn how you can make the most out of this revolutionary AI tool for your marketing goals.

1. Product images

Visuals that are beautiful and neat can easily capture the audience's attention. DALL-E 2 can help designers in your marketing team in the ideation of both digital and real product images along with saving time and lots of money on product photoshoots. Sometimes it is hard to come up with concepts for product images. At that point, DALL-E 2 comes to the rescue. Not only does it create high-quality product images but also modifies them if it looks dull. Later, designers can retouch them to match the brand guidelines. 

2. Social media 

To keep up with the ever-evolving social media, it is essential to stand out from the crowd with your content. From funny caricatures of your employees to hilarious memes, DALL-E 2 can give a twist to the visuals on your social media page within seconds to bring in more followers and clients.

3. Print media

Not only digitally, but you can take advantage of this AI tool to create pictures for your marketing collateral such as posters, flyers, banners, magazines, and more. For instance, Heinz became a sensation for its real-life marketing campaign by using the DALL-E 2 generator.

4. Website and blog posts

Looking for unique images to brighten your website and blog posts? DALL-E 2 is your go-to tool. It’s also a great way to optimize your images for SEO. The prompts used to generate them can easily be incorporated into your image description — using these keywords and phrases get you to the top of that Google search.

5. Editing images

DALL-E 2 not only generates images but also helps to tweak your images to perfection. It offers a feature to add or remove elements from the images. Designers can work flexibly with these images as per your team’s requirements. 

Want to add a comic character of your choice with a magnifying lens peeking over an enormous book? Consider it done with DALL-E 2!

6. Brewing ideas

Is your marketing team having a creative block? Again, DALL-E can help your team get on their feet by helping them bring ideas that match your brand’s vision. The great thing about artificial intelligence art generators is that they don’t burn out as human designers do. And that’s what makes it such a great tool.

Limitations

While DALL-E features can blow your mind, remember to not count on them too much. This AI tool has its own set of drawbacks.

1. Not brand compliant: Since the tool is not aware of your brand guidelines or design or logo, it may not match your requirements. So, be careful to not use the images it generates if you want to ensure brand consistency across channels.

2. Lacks human touch: Every image your brand shares must contain a message or a visual that can connect to the audience. Sometimes you may not get what you are trying to convey to your audience through an AI-generated image as it lacks the human touch.

‍3. Spelling errors: DALL-E is not always accurate with its spelling. The reason may be that DALL·E 2 doesn’t encode spelling info from the text present in dataset images. If something isn’t represented in CLIP embeddings, DALL·E 2 can’t draw it correctly. But there’s a chance for it to perform better if DALL·E 2 were trained to encode the words in the images.

For e.g., the prompt added by a user was ‘deep learning hitting a wall’ but the result was as shown below:

4. Limited intelligence: At times, the tool may struggle to understand the relative position of objects or elements in the required image. It might be fantastic at generating images as per the prompt but may not place objects in the picture equally. It also struggles to produce complex images and tends to give humans more than 5 fingers almost always. Hands and fingers are something it struggles with.

5. It can be biased: The image DALL-E generates may feature some amount of bias. For e.g., if your prompt is, “a successful CEO receiving a standing ovation”, the AI tool might generate a picture of a man in a suit receiving the praise and not a woman. This is because of the dataset retrieved by the internet from where the information is taken.

‍6. Not profitable: You cannot make money off of the images themselves due to copyright issues and such. You can, however, use them in headers, posters, etc.

DALL-E and Brand Asset Management tool

Dall-E 2 and other AI generator tools are going to improve in the coming years and it is important to grab the opportunities in this competitive business world. Having a powerful tool like DALL-E 2 can streamline your team’s creative and design process within seconds. 

To store the generated and edited images and other visual assets, it is necessary to use a brand asset management tool. AI and BAM tools go well hand-in-hand when it comes to searchability, creative proofing, automated curation of content, and more. Artwork Flow is the perfect brand asset management platform if you’re looking to store and manage your retouched assets in a centralized workspace. You can explore the platform better with a 7-day free trial!