OpenAI has launched Dall-E 3, the latest version of a text-to-image tool that uses its large language model (LLM) programme ChatGPT.

The popular generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tool allows users to type in a description for an image which is then created via OpenAI's trained AI.

Open AI said Dall-E 3 is still in the testing stage and will be available will be available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers in October.

The company said that the while images created through the use of the program belong to the user, no permission is needed from OpenAI to reprint or sell them.

OpenAI said the new version of the program will have more safety features such as limiting the ability to produce violent or harmful content.

“Modern text-to-image systems have a tendency to ignore words or descriptions, forcing users to learn prompt engineering. DALL·E 3 represents a leap forward in our ability to generate images that exactly adhere to the text you provide,” OpenAI said on its website.

The launch follows the news that a trade group representing US authors has sued OpenAI over copy write issues. The group of authors, which includes John Grisham and George R.R. Martin, are accusing the company of unlawfully using their work to train ChatGPT.

The proposed class-action lawsuit claims that the datasets used to train OpenAI's LLM may have been taken from illegal online book repositories and used entirely without the required permissions.

The issue of AI-generated art has become widely contentious, with its detractors claiming that anything generated would be based on work of existing artists and therefore should be considered as plagiarism or theft. It is a key part of the ongoing Hollywood writers' strikes, with the WGA demanding that any use of AI is tightly regulated and not used at the expense of real-world jobs.

Earlier this month, The Guardian announced that it had blocked OpenAI from scraping its content to power its tools.

OpenAI and other GenAI firms have argued that their use of training data scraped from the internet falls under US copyright law as fair use.

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