🧙🏼 Testing GPT-4o's image generation

Howdy wizards,

In this week’s edition:

• ChatGPT’s wild new image generator: what it is and how it might change design

• Some specific ways you can use it in your work

Here’s what’s brewing in AI.

DARIO’S PICKS

ChatGPT’s new image generation — everything you need to know

OpenAI’s GPT-4o model now has native image generation and it almost makes DALL-E seem like it belongs in a digital museum. It’s available right inside ChatGPT—just make sure you've got GPT-4o selected in the model picker.

Here’s the deets:

• GPT-4o’s image generation is top of the line at rendering text and accurately following prompts

• It’s really good at transforming images you upload by using them as visual inspiration (hello, all the Ghibli images all over your social media this week)

• The accuracy of the image generation makes it not just impressive—but useful for many everyday design and communication tasks 

• OpenAI’s has released a series of short demos showcasing different aspects: character consistency, text rendering, detailed instruction following, transparent images and visual restyling.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ The devil is in the details when it comes to design—and OpenAI’s latest brainchild is the first image generator that gets the details right. We might be at a point where a designers’ workflow is truly changing, just like a developer’s job has been transformed lately by vibe coding and tools like Cursor.

As you might expect—this model is slow and GPU-intensive. Generations are way slower than DALL-E. The usage amount is also quite restricted: even on a paid plan, you will quickly hit the rate limits and have to wait 10ish minutes before you can resume using it. OpenAI also dialled back usage for free users to max 3 generations per day, saying their “GPUs are melting”.

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UP CLOSE

Testing GPT-4o’s image generation on design tasks

I’ve taken the 4o model’s new image generation for a quick spin on some common graphic design tasks—so it’s easier to for you to judge what you can and cannot use it for in your own work.

Here’s some use cases where it really impressed me:

As you can see, there’s a lot of stuff that works really well.

Here’s the tasks I’ve tried where the result was not good:

• One-shot infographics — 4/10: 🙅🏻‍♂️ also includes other text heavy stuff. It’s pretty clear that when you overload it with content it starts messing up—text gets unreadable, images look less polished, etc. You could probably still generate pieces of your concept individually, then patch together in something like Figma/Canva.

• Data visualisations — 2/10: 🙅🏻‍♂️ this one is still totally off limits. I think data viz will stay firmly in the domain of traditional tools (that actually maps values to pixels in an exact way) for the foreseeable future. You might’ve already noticed the GPT-4o model has the mathematical precision of a toddler with crayons—so it easily messes up the value mapping needed for charts.

A big upgrade overall is that you can now ask for transparent images—this means the output is way more versatile and can easily be copied into tools like PS/Figma/Canva and used in your designs.

Other fascinating things people are using the new image generation for:

• Creating product ads in different styles

• Interior design makeover and architectural renderings

• 2D character animation sprite sheets for games

• Turning pictures from r/AccidentalRenaissance into actual renaissance paintings

• Frame by frame animations — asking for multiple images and for the ChatGPT to use Python to stitch them into an animation

Before you start wallpapering your company's channels with AI cartoons, remember: everyone and their tech-savvy grandma has access to this now. The internet is already being absolutely flooded with these images.

That’s also why I think graphic designers’ jobs are still safe—what makes creative work stand out is not just technique, but taste and vision, something AI doesn’t have (for now..).

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THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

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