The company debuted the “high-quality” image-generation tool as a way to produce everything from diagrams, infographics and logos to business cards and stock photos. The feature can also use an image as a starting point for art, such as a custom painting of a pet or editing a professional headshot.
The image-generation feature began rolling out to ChatGPT PLUS, Pro and Team users starting Tuesday, March 25th, as well as users of the chatbot’s free tier when they use OpenAI’s 4o model. ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu users will receive access one week after, the company said.
Just 24 hour later the launch OpenAI has halted access to the image generator for free users amid high demand. “Images in chatgpt are way more popular than we expected” CEO Sam Altman. “Rollout to our free tier is unfortunately going to be delayed for a while”, added Altman.
48 hour from launch, on Thursday, March 26, 2025, the CEO of OpenAi announced on X (former Twitter) that viral use of ChatGPT’s new image-generation AI introduced a few days before his post, is overloading the company’s servers. “While it is super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT, our GPUs are melting,” said Altman. Images of anime-style renderings of users’ uploaded photos have been going viral on X and other social media apps since the new featured launch.
When artificial intelligence first came out, and ChatGPT introduced DALL-E, online entrepreneurs were excited until they ran into the many roadblocks that came with trying to produce images with this tool. It was very difficult to prompt DALL-E and get anything resembling what you were hoping to have. Not only could it not master any type of text addition to images, but you couldn’t iterate and tweak something to make it better without it completely changing the image to something brand new.
Now, instead of being a hit or miss feature, OpenAl has changed from DALL-E to nativeimage generation with ChatGPT 40. This means that we can stop paying for additional Al image tools and have access to an image creator that is responsive and can engage in a conversation with you rather than forcing you to start over from scratch with every single alteration. To check the OpenAi page introducing the 4o Image Generation go HERE.
This is going to make the image process much faster and targeted to the needs of your niche, regardless of what platform you plan to post the graphics on. Keep in mind that this is a relatively new feature, so you may run into some quirks. But the good news is, it’s much easier to refine and correct any type of small failure, just as you can in some of the other more advanced image generation Al tools.