DALL-E 2 (2022)
In April 2022, OpenAI unveiled DALL-E 2, letting anyone type a phrase and get a picture. The waitlist ran in the hundreds of thousands, and artists, journalists, and hobbyists flooded in.
The tool went viral and set off a licensing and watermarking debate.
Within two years, every major AI lab shipped a text-to-image model; DALL-E became a category name.
It created the market Images 2.5 now fights over, and the editing and misuse questions that resurface with each new model.
