OpenAI is holding off on bringing its image-generation tool to free-tier users, citing unexpectedly high demand.
CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the delay in a post on Wednesday, stating that the rollout “is unfortunately going to be delayed for a while.”
The feature, which allows users to generate images within ChatGPT using GPT-4o, was introduced just a day earlier. Since then, social media has been flooded with AI-generated images, particularly those inspired by Studio Ghibli’s art style—a trend even Altman has engaged with.
GPT-4o improves text rendering and uses an autoregressive approach for image generation, meaning it creates images gradually from left to right and top to bottom instead of all at once. For now, the tool remains available only to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers, with no clear timeline for when free users will get access.
