Images 2.6

SVG support is interesting but I suspect shenanigans are afoot since that's not how image generation models work, and it would likely strip any SynthID watermarks. It's possible OpenAI has pipelined a raster-to-vector tool that does the conversion automatically. (I developed a similar pipeline and it works extremely well; I'll open source it at some point)

EDIT: Per documentation, there is an explicit `output_format: "svg"`, and I am indeed correct there is raster-to-vector in play:

> The API creates a reference image and uses it to produce the SVG. The quality setting controls that reference image. Decode data[0].b64_json as base64 and save the resulting UTF-8 XML bytes with a .svg extension.

OpenAI claims 50% faster generation with Images 2.6 but curiously price is the same as Image 2.5.

I didn't have high expectations, and I still think you can probably get better results by doing a First-Last-Frame using something like Minimax H3 but I was still rather surprised that it could do it at all.

Here are some of the results. The last one shows its ability to take an existing image and convert it into an animated GIF. It's a picture of my husky inside a snow globe.

https://imgpb.com/OzSMKJ

I guess I should have been careful about “half”?

These models have a hard time imagining men with naturally blond hair getting grey.

"A macro close-up photograph of an old watchmaker's hands carefully replacing a tiny gear inside a vintage pocket watch. The watch mechanism is partially submerged in a shallow dish of clear water, causing visible refraction and light caustics across the brass gears. A single drop of water is falling from a pair of steel tweezers, captured mid-splash on the water's surface. Reflect the watchmaker's face, slightly distorted, in the curved glass of the watch face. Sharp focus throughout, natural window lighting from the left, shot on 100mm macro lens."

2.6: https://gov.f9.is/JRDpHJGu

2.0: https://gov.f9.is/cqyCwtq9

It feels like a sleazy pattern and defeats the purpose of why I’d want to generate a gif in the first place, which to make clear is likely going to be to share with friends in a chat. I’m not interested in driving traffic to ChatGPT.com to impress my friends.

Like, I'm not even an artist, so I'm sure there's a million things I'm missing, but it's just so upsetting to look at. There's weird random reflections on things that shouldn't have reflections, the coloured light absolutely doesn't actually track through the stained glass onto any surface that makes any sense, light is coming from every which way, it's just... gross to look at for anything more than a quarter of a second.

And this is what they're using to hype people up for it. /shrug

2.5 low, 196 tokens, $0.006

2.6 low, 823 tokens, $0.025

2.5 med, 439 tokens, $0.013

2.6 med, 1449 tokens, $0.043

Interestingly, higher quality settings show no change in token usage between the models.

I've been playing with it for the last hour or so. I immediately updated my platform to use both since 2.5 is my primary model (i run a prompt->design site).

After playing with it for an hour, I'm rolling back 2.6-flare to 2.5-flare. I've found 2.6-flare specifically to either be too simplistic in its approaches, or create outputs that are inherently broken in other cases.

Comparison examples: https://diffui.ai/app/canvas/178db5d5-ff87-4b43-aa98-2897773...

2.6-sunburst seems solid however.

Update: seems to be confirmed on arena.ai - 2.5 scores higher than 2.6 https://arena.ai/leaderboard/image/text-to-image

> Images 2.6 is available globally today in ChatGPT and Codex across all subscription tiers on desktop, mobile, and web.

But I just updated my codex-cli to the latest version (still 0.166.0) and it is still unable to generate gifs. Very disappointing

SVG is cool though, I wonder how good it is.

> Create a GIF where xkcd 2347 gets hit by an airliner like the twin towers and the pilot is AI

and got a refusal.

> We’re so sorry, but the image we created may violate our guardrails around violence.