Has anyone else experienced a major drop in GPT Image quality over the last few days?
Before this started, I was consistently getting detailed images with strong linework, texture, shading, composition, and good adherence to my references. Now the results look noticeably flatter, more generic, and much less accurate.
I’ve attached two images for comparison. Both were created using the same prompt and the same general workflow, just on different days. The first image is what I was getting before. The second image is what I’m getting now.
The generator is not technically down because the images still complete, but the quality has dropped so much that the results are no longer usable for my work.
I’ve already tested this in a new conversation, incognito mode, another browser, another device, directly in ChatGPT, and through Magnific using GPT Image. The same issue keeps happening, so it does not seem like a cache or browser problem.
Has anyone else noticed this? Could this be related to model routing or the recent image-generation incidents?
The reason I don’t think this is just a prompt issue is because we’ve been using this same style and workflow to generate thousands of images, and it has consistently produced a fairly similar look over time.
Ever since image generation went down two days ago, something has clearly changed. The same style of prompts and references now gives results that are noticeably worse and much less consistent than before.
I also don’t think this is account-specific because I’m seeing the same problem both on my own ChatGPT Pro account and through a separate API platform using the image model there as well. That’s why this feels more like a broader change that started after the outage.
Thank you, I’ll take a look at that thread. What makes this stand out to me is that we’ve already used this same style across thousands of generations, so I have a pretty strong sense of what the output normally looks like. It usually stayed fairly consistent, but ever since the outage two days ago, the results have changed a lot. That’s why it feels less like normal variation and more like something shifted after the downtime.
Then, upon a failure or a re-request, especially were you to request specifically an image attribute not normally supported or were you to use a thinking mode, you get a long wait and instead no dialog and a blank chat for a full minute after “generating a more detailed image”.
Here’s the bizarre output of that second mode, which is 1774x887 pixels wide, absolute conformance to the aspect ratio instead of a request for a resolution.
One is powerless on ChatGPT to get an image creation without making re-attempts, a platform that comes without particular promise or guarantee of stability or quality.
I read an older thread you replied to where you mentioned having to switch from Low to Medium because the image quality had dropped. I was still getting good results on Low until two days ago, but now I’m having the exact same problem and need to use Medium to get anything close to the quality Low used to give me. Did Low ever return to normal for you, or have you had to keep using Medium ever since?
Yo mind, I’ve noticed the same thing. I use chatgpt to make stellaris portrait mods and noticed the image quality go from really good to horrible today. First image is now, second is before.
In all honesty, I’ve mostly kept using quality: medium, because I felt that quality: low affected the image quality. Most of my images are cinematic/realistic and I could see the difference in finer details especially human anatomy, such as hands and fingers.
Since it’s been a while since I last used quality: low, though, I’d need to run another test to see how it performs now.
I saw your reply on the other topic too, but my recommendation is to keep it inside one topic, that is if we’re replying to each other.
Came here seeing if someone else noticed the degradation too. Ever since the outage, it has consistenly started giving really bad images. I make educational content for kids and chatgpt just went from being absolutely excellent at nailing down my project briefs/instrcutions to giving me basic text based images. N the OpenAI status page says they’re “not aware of any issues affecting our systems” -_-
Edit: pretty sure you can tell which image is pre-outage and which one is post-outage. Im not imagining this
