Codex Image Generation Becomes “Infographic Locked” After a Render Error

Codex
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Is there any fix for this issue yet, other than starting a new Codex conversation?

Yesterday I ran into this issue after generating around 50 images over several days. Everything had been working perfectly until Codex suddenly started generating completely unrelated infographic/poster-style images instead of the requested illustrations (which never contained any text).

I checked the Thinking log while it was working and could see Codex repeatedly rewriting its image prompts in an attempt to steer the model away from generating infographics. It explicitly added instructions such as “no text,” “illustration only,” “not an infographic,” and “not a poster,” yet every attempt still resulted in unrelated infographic-style images. This continued for around 45 minutes before it eventually gave up without producing any usable results.

I also asked Codex to show me the prompts it was sending to the image model. They all looked correct and contained nothing that would reasonably explain why infographic-style images were being generated. The subjects shown in the generated infographics were also completely unrelated to anything we had discussed in the conversation.

As a workaround, I asked Codex to fork the conversation and create a dedicated illustration thread/agent. In the new thread Image generation immediately started working correctly again and has continued to do so far.

However, the original conversation still exhibits the same behaviour. The conversation and other tasks works perfectly, but if I ask it to generate another illustration it starts the same process again; it spends a very long time thinking (around 15 minutes before I eventually stop it) with repeatedly rewriting its prompts while continuing to produce unrelated infographics.

One detail that may or may not be relevant is that all my prompts in this project are written in Swedish, while the text appearing in the generated infographic images is always in English.

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@litepe Welcome to the forum!

Thanks.

That is not only helpful in this context but others.

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A small update after digging into this a bit more, because I came across another interesting observation.

After the original issue appeared, I kept experimenting in the affected Codex conversation to better understand what was happening and see if it could be fixed.

I tried different GPT models, different reasoning levels, different speed settings, very simple prompts (like “a dog”), and both generating new images and editing existing ones. None of these made any difference. From the moment the issue first appeared, the image tool consistently produced unrelated infographic/poster-style images instead of following the prompt.

Then I stumbled upon something interesting. As part of my troubleshooting, I asked the project manager to edit an existing image from the original project (that image had been created by the Illustrator earlier today). It was probably a dumb idea to use an image from the project, because the project manager apparently treated it as a normal production task. It spent roughly 20 minutes trying to edit the image itself, repeatedly switching between different approaches (AI editing, local compositing, manual image manipulation, etc.), and during those attempts it also generated another unrelated infographic.

Without me asking it to do so, it eventually decided to hand the task over to the Illustrator fork as a fallback. The Illustrator managed to produce the requested edited image after several failed attempts. However, the same response also contained an unrelated infographic. From that point on, the Illustrator started showing the same symptoms as the project manager: very long thinking times followed by unrelated infographic/poster outputs instead of the requested images.

What I found particularly interesting is that the project manager had delegated image tasks to the Illustrator many times before without any issues. The only thing that was different this time was that it forwarded the task after spending around 20 minutes unsuccessfully trying to edit the image itself.

I want to be very clear that I’m not claiming this proves anything, since it could absolutely be a coincidence. But because several people seem to be experiencing the infographic issue, I thought this behavior was worth sharing in case anyone else notices the same pattern.

For now, I simply forked a brand new Illustrator from the same project manager conversation, and the new one has been working perfectly, with no infographic posters in sight. I’m going to keep experimenting to see if I can reproduce this behavior one more time, mostly just for fun.

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Thanks for coming back to share with us.

Let us know if you dig anything else up!