ChatGPT can now generate images for free using Dall-E

By Andrew Tarantola August 9, 2024

A striped cat drawn by Dall-E — OpenAI

Since its launch last September, OpenAI’s Dall-E 3 image generator has only been available to its Plus, Teams, and Enterprise subscribers. Now, nearly a year later, Dall-E is accessible to the rest of us — just with some stringent restrictions.

We’re rolling out the ability for ChatGPT Free users to create up to two images per day with DALL·E 3.

Just ask ChatGPT to create an image for a slide deck, personalize a card for a friend, or show you what something looks like. pic.twitter.com/3csFTscA5I

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) August 8, 2024

You get a whole whopping two images generated for you, per day. It’s not nothing, but it also isn’t much, especially given that you can generate images to your hearts desire for free over on Microsoft Copilot, which is running on the exact same GPT-4o model as ChatGPT. Google’s Gemini also allows its free tier users to create images, though Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 does not — it can currently only analyze uploaded pictures.

Generating images with ChatGPT on the free tier is no different than doing so previously with the paid subscriptions. Ensure you’re using the GPT-4 model (as long as you haven’t recently hit your ChatGPT daily usage limits, you should be OK), then simply type your request into the context window and wait for the AI to do its thing.

And, just as with using text-based prompts, you’ll want to be clear with your instructions and provide as much concise context as you can. The more you detail you can include about what you want Dall-E to create, the more accurate the AI will be on its first try.

The feature is currently rolling out to all users, according to OpenAI, though I could access it as this article was being written. When asked to “draw a picture of a cat — it should be a line drawing with no color or fill” –the AI chugged along for around 10 seconds before it returned a perfectly decent line drawing of a cat, as requested.

A simple line drawing of a cat produced by Dall-E — OpenAI

Asking the system to give the cat stripes returned the image at the top of the post, as well as used up my remaining image generation request for the day.

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Andrew Tarantola

Computing Writer

Andrew has spent more than a decade reporting on emerging technologies ranging from robotics and machine learning to space…

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