OpenAI’s new ChatGPT picture generator makes faking photographs simple

For many of images’s roughly 200-year historical past, altering a photograph convincingly required both a darkroom, some Photoshop experience, or, at minimal, a gradual hand with scissors and glue. On Tuesday, OpenAI launched a instrument that reduces the method to typing a sentence.

It’s not the primary firm to take action. Whereas OpenAI had a conversational image-editing mannequin within the works since GPT-4o in 2024, Google beat OpenAI to market in March with a public prototype, then refined it to a well-liked mannequin referred to as Nano Banana picture mannequin (and Nano Banana Professional). The enthusiastic response to Google’s image-editing mannequin within the AI group received OpenAI’s consideration.

OpenAI’s new GPT Picture 1.5 is an AI picture synthesis mannequin that reportedly generates photos as much as 4 occasions quicker than its predecessor and prices about 20 p.c much less by the API. The mannequin rolled out to all ChatGPT customers on Tuesday and represents one other step towards making photorealistic picture manipulation an informal course of that requires no specific visible expertise.

GPT Picture 1.5 is notable as a result of it’s a “native multimodal” picture mannequin, that means picture era occurs inside the identical neural community that processes language prompts. (In distinction, DALL-E 3, an earlier OpenAI picture generator beforehand constructed into ChatGPT, used a distinct method referred to as diffusion to generate photos.)

This newer sort of mannequin, which we lined in additional element in March, treats photos and textual content as the identical type of factor: chunks of information referred to as “tokens” to be predicted, patterns to be accomplished. For those who add a photograph of your dad and sort “put him in a tuxedo at a marriage,” the mannequin processes your phrases and the picture pixels in a unified area, then outputs new pixels the identical means it might output the subsequent phrase in a sentence.

Utilizing this system, GPT Picture 1.5 can extra simply alter visible actuality than earlier AI picture fashions, altering somebody’s pose or place, or rendering a scene from a barely completely different angle, with various levels of success. It could actually additionally take away objects, change visible kinds, regulate clothes, and refine particular areas whereas preserving facial likeness throughout successive edits. You’ll be able to converse with the AI mannequin a couple of {photograph}, refining and revising, the identical means you may workshop a draft of an electronic mail in ChatGPT.