Free ChatGPT users can now generate two images with DALL-E 3 each day. It’s better than nothing, but the two-per-day limit doesn’t make much sense.
The DALL-E 3 image generator is nearing its first birthday. Obviously, a year is a long time in the world of AI. DALL-E 3 will soon be superseded by the GPT-4o image generator, though it’s still an incredibly capable tool in its own right, which is why full access requires a $20 monthly ChatGPT Plus subscription.
You can tap into DALL-E 3 by asking ChatGPT to create an image. A prompt like “create a cute watercolor image of a chicken with a farmer on a white background” is a good starting point. Giving the AI additional context, like “I want to use the image as a blog header,” can lead to more precise results.
However, Microsoft Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator) and Microsoft Copilot offer unlimited DALL-E 3 image generation for free, with 15 high-speed outputs per day. Google Gemini and Meta AI can do free image generation as well. There are also several free and open-source tools, like Craiyon or Stable Diffusion, that can get the job done.
Limited DALLE-E 3 access in the ChatGPT free plan isn’t a bad thing. There are plenty of people who exclusively rely on ChatGPT for occasional or frequent tasks. Still, this feels like an overhanded and dishonest way of driving ChatGPT Plus subscriptions. Free users will rarely get the image they want in two tries, and unless they do some research, they won’t realize that Bing provides DALLE-3 at zero cost.
You could argue that the ChatGPT free membership is designed to drive subscriptions—duh, of course it is. Here’s the thing; OpenAI’s free GPT-4o access is far more generous than this image generation feature. A free user can spend hours interacting with GPT-4o before they hit their daily limit, and when that limit is reached, they’re simply downgraded to GPT-3.
Things may change for the better when GPT-4o image generation rolls out. Free users could have a few passes at GPT-4o image generation before being knocked down to unlimited DALL-E 3 each day, for example. But OpenAI hasn’t provided a release date for GPT-4o image generation, and it hasn’t announced future plans for free access.
Source: OpenAI
