If you are a free user of ChatGPT, you can now use its new image generator 4o (again)

It is official! If you are a user of the free ChatGPT plan, you can now once again create amazing images with its new image generator 4o. OpenAI has reinstated universal access to the tool after having paused it just one day after its launch due to the substantial volume of requests.

chatgpt image gen now rolled out to all free users!

— Sam Altman (@sama) April 1, 2025

Temporary pause after tremendous reception

On March 25th, OpenAI introduced its new image generator AI which is natively integrated into GPT-4o. This launch marked a true revolution due to the substantial leap in quality it represented compared to its DALL-E family of models (which were already quite efficient in their own right).

The image generator 4o stands out for creating works of higher quality, realism, and in a wide variety of artistic styles. Additionally, it has a superior capability for generating precise details and integrating coherent text, also being able to create consistent variations of an existing work.

All these qualities, combined with the fact that the AI was deployed on various paid plans and also on the free plan, led to overwhelming success (which was especially driven by the creation and versioning of images in the “Ghibli style”). Such was the number of people using the tool that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, ended up temporarily removing access from the free plan.

images in chatgpt are wayyyy more popular than we expected (and we had pretty high expectations).

rollout to our free tier is unfortunately going to be delayed for awhile.

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 26, 2025

Fortunately, this limitation did not last long and the capabilities of the image generator 4o are once again available to all users of the free ChatGPT plan. However, it is quite likely this version has certain limitations. In a tweet published by Altman last week, he stated that “the free tier of ChatGPT will soon have 3 generations per day.”

Photo: OpenAI