Google's Text-To-Image AI Model Imagen Is Getting Its First (Very Limited) Public Outing

Google's text-to-image AI system, Imagen, is being added to the company's AI Test Kitchen app as a way to collect early feedback on the technology. The Verge reports: AI Test Kitchen was launched earlier this year as a way for Google to beta test various AI systems. Currently, the app offers a few different ways to interact with Google's text model LaMDA (yes, the same one that the engineer thought was sentient), and the company will soon be adding similarly constrained Imagen requests as part of what it calls a "season two" update to the app. In short, there'll be two ways to interact with Imagen, which Google demoed to The Verge ahead of the announcement today: "City Dreamer" and "Wobble." In City Dreamer, users can ask the model to generate elements from a city designed around a theme of their choice -- say, pumpkins, denim, or the color blerg. Imagen creates sample buildings and plots (a town square, an apartment block, an airport, and so on), with all the designs appearing as isometric models similar to what you'd see in SimCity. In Wobble, you create a little monster. You can choose what it's made out of (clay, felt, marzipan, rubber) and then dress it in the clothing of your choice. The model generates your monster, gives it a name, and then you can sort of poke and prod the thing to make it "dance." Again, the model's output is constrained to a very specific aesthetic, which, to my mind, looks like a cross between Pixar's designs for Monsters, Inc. and the character creator feature in Spore. (Someone on the AI team must be a Will Wright fan.) These interactions are extremely constrained compared to other text-to-image models, and users can't just request anything they'd like. That's intentional on Google's part, though. As Josh Woodward, senior director of product management at Google, explained to The Verge, the whole point of AI Test Kitchen is to a) get feedback from the public on these AI systems and b) find out more about how people will break them. Google wouldn't share any data on how many people are actually using AI Test Kitchen ("We didn't set out to make this a billion user Google app," says Woodward) but says the feedback it's getting is invaluable. "Engagement is way above our expectations," says Woodward. "It's a very active, opinionated group of users." He notes the app has been useful in reaching "certain types of folks -- researchers, policymakers" who can use it to better understand the limitations and capabilities of state-of-the-art AI models. Still, the big question is whether Google will want to push these models to a wider public and, if so, what form will that take? Already, the company's rivals, OpenAI and Stability AI, are rushing to commercialize text-to-image models. Will Google ever feel its systems are safe enough to take out of the AI Test Kitchen and serve up to its users?

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