OpenAI announced DALL·E 2, an image generation AI that uses a diffusion process to create realistic images and art from natural language descriptions, with 4x the resolution of the original DALL·E introduced in 2021. It added context-aware edits to existing images and the ability to generate variations of an original. Initially released as a limited, waitlist-based research preview to validate safety mitigations, it became one of the sparks of that year's image generation AI boom.