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 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.
To power the new image feature, OpenAI told the Wall Street Journal it trained GPT-4o on “publicly available data,” as well as proprietary data from its partnerships with companies like Shutterstock.
Many generative AI vendors see training data as a competitive advantage, so they 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.
“We’re respectful of the artists’ rights in terms of how we do the output, and we have policies in place that prevent us from generating images that directly mimic any living artists’ work,” said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, in a statement to the Journal.
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.
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