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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently released another update—GPT-4o image generation—marking the first significant upgrade to ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities in over a year.
The generative AI can now leverage the company’s GPT-4o model to create and modify images and photos natively. GPT-4o has long underpinned the AI-powered chatbot platform, but the model could never generate and edit more than text, as users may have wanted.
Altman declares GPT-4o image generation is available publicly in ChatGPT and Sora, OpenAI’s AI video-generation product, for subscribers to the company’s $200-a-month Pro plan. The company affirmed that such updates would soon extend to ChatGPT Plus users and developers using the company’s API service.
Unlike the DALL-E 3— the previous image-generation model, GPT-4o now does better with image output processes, which are also a bit longer than the previous one. Due to the recent updates, OpenAI describes this development as more accurate and detailed images. GPT-4o can edit existing images, including pictures with people, 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” and proprietary data from its partnerships with companies like Shutterstock.
Following the GPT-4o image generation update, we found that many generative AI vendors see training data as a competitive advantage, so they keep it and any related information close to the chest. However, training data details are also a potential source of IP-related lawsuits, another disincentive.
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, told the Journal in a statement that “we’re respecting 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.”
OpenAI offers an opt-out form that allows creators to request that their works be removed from its training datasets. The company also respects requests to disallow its web-scraping bots from collecting training data, including images, from websites.
GPT-4o image generation feature follows Google’s experimental native image output for Gemini 2.0 Flash, one of the company’s flagship models. The robust feature went viral on social media, although not necessarily for the best reasons. Gemini 2.0 Flash’s image component had a few challenges, allowing people to remove watermarks and create images depicting copyrighted characters.
