It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image maker went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away”, TechCrunch reported.
In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen AI-generated images representing Studio Ghibli versions of Elon Musk, “The Lord of the Rings”, and President Donald Trump. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even seems to have made his new profile a Studio Ghibli-style image, presumably made with GPT-4.o’s native image generator. Users seem to be uploading existing images and pictures into ChatGPT and asking the chatbot to re-create it in new styles.
OpenAI’s latest update comes on the heels of Google’s release of a similar AI image feature in its Gemini Flash model, which also sparked a viral movement earlier in March when people used it to remove watermarks from images.
ArsTechnica reported: The arrival of OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 in the spring of 2022 marked a turning point in AI, when text-to-image generation suddenly became accessible to a select group of users, creating a community of digital explorers who experienced wonder and controversy as the technology automated that act of visual creation.
But like many early AI systems, DALL-E 2 struggled with consistent text rendering, often producing garbled words and phrases within images. It also had limitations in following complex prompts with multiple elements, sometimes missing key details or misinterpreting instructions. These shortcomings left room for improvement that OpenAI would address in subsequent iterations, such as DALL-E 3 in 2023.
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced new multimodal image-generation capabilities that are directly integrated into its GPT-4o AI language model, making it the default image generator within the ChatGPT interface. The integration, called “4o Image Generation”, allows the model to follow prompts more accurately (with better text rendering than DALL-E 3) and respond to chat context for image modification instructions.
The new image-generation feature began rolling out Tuesday to ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users, with Enterprise and Education access coming later. The capability is also available within OpenAI’s Sora video-generation tool. OpenAI told Ars that the image generation when GPT-4.5 is selected calls upon the same 4o-based image-generation model as when GPT4.o is selected in the ChatGPT interface.
The Verge reported: OpenAI is pushing back the rollout of ChatGPT’s built-in image generator for free users. In a post on Wednesday, CEO Sam Altman admitted that the image-generation tool is more popular than he expected, adding that “rollout to our free tier is unfortunately going to be delayed for a while.”
OpenAI only just added image generation capabilities to ChatGPT on Tuesday, allowing users to create images directly within the app using the company’s reasoning model, GPT-4o. Since its launch, users have flooded social media feeds with photos transformed into images generated in the style of Studio Ghibli, a trend that even Altman has gotten in on.