During a livestream on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the first major upgrade to ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities in over a year.
ChatGPT can now leverage the company’s GPT-4o model to natively create and modify images and photos. GPT-4o has long underpinned the AI-powered chatbot platform, but until now, the model has been able to generate and edit only text — not images.
Altman said GPT-4o native image generation is live today in ChatGPT and Sora, OpenAI’s AI video-generation product, for subscribers to the company’s $200-a-month Pro plan. OpenAI says the feature is rolling out soon to Plus and free users of ChatGPT, as well as to developers using the company’s API service.
GPT-4o with image output “thinks” a bit longer than the image-generation model it effectively replaces, DALL-E 3, to make what OpenAI describes as more accurate and detailed images. GPT-4o can edit existing images, including images with people in them — transforming them or “inpainting” details like foreground and background objects.
OpenAI didn’t reveal which image data it used to enable the new image-generation capabilities. Many generative AI vendors see training data as a competitive advantage and so keep it and any information related to it close to the chest. But training data details are also a potential source of IP-related lawsuits, another disincentive for companies to reveal much.
OpenAI offers an opt-out form that allows creators to request that their works be removed from its training datasets. The company also says that it respects requests to disallow its web-scraping bots from collecting training data, including images, from websites.
ChatGPT’s upgraded image-generation feature follows on the heels of Google’s experimental native image output for Gemini 2.0 Flash, one of the company’s flagship models. The powerful feature went viral on social media — but not necessarily for the best reasons. Gemini 2.0 Flash’s image component turned out to have few guardrails, allowing people to remove watermarks and create images depicting copyrighted characters.
