The logo of Alibaba Group is seen at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China, 6 July 2023.
Ellie Song | Reuters
Chinese tech giants alibaba On Friday, it launched an artificial intelligence tool that can generate images based on prompts.
Uni-President Wanxiang allows users to input prompts in Chinese and English, and AI tools will generate images in various styles such as sketches or 3D cartoons.
Alibaba Cloud, which launched the product, said it was available for beta testing by enterprise customers in China.
Uni-President Vientiane is Alibaba’s latest generative artificial intelligence offering, a technology both Chinese and American tech giants are hoping to gain leadership in.
Generative AI refers to an AI capable of generating content based on prompts. It is able to do this by training on a large amount of data. The most famous example is OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which sparked the largest tech companies to develop their own competitors.
In the U.S, Google Launched an AI chatbot called Bard. In China, Baidu released Ernie Bot, and Alibaba launched Uniform Qianwen.
There are already AI text-to-image generation services available. OpenAI’s DALL-E and a service called Stable Diffusion are two of the most notable.
“With the release of Unified Wanxiang, high-quality generated AI imagery will become more accessible, thereby facilitating the development of innovative AI art and creative expression for businesses in various fields such as e-commerce, gaming, design, and advertising. Zhou Jingren, chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said in a press release.
Tech giants are careful not to offend regulators when releasing these generative AI products. Companies like Alibaba and Baidu are very specific about their AI tools. Alibaba, for example, focuses its offerings on enterprises.
This is because Chinese authorities have introduced regulatory measures against generative artificial intelligence technology. In January, Beijing introduced its first regulations governing “deep compositing technology,” or images and videos modified by artificial intelligence. In April, the regulator published draft rules aimed at governing how companies develop generative artificial intelligence products.
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