I love ChatGPT-4o's unhinged image-generation capabilities — but I'm afraid imminent censorship by OpenAI lurks on the horizon

Last year, xAI's Grok burst into the AI scene. The AI chatbot received a lot of praise from users, touting it as "the most based and uncensored model of its class yet." Elon Musk didn't hold back from reveling in the platform's seemingly successful launch, claiming Grok is the most fun AI in the world trained using the world's most powerful AI cluster.

As you may know, most AI tools are heavily censored, which has seemingly capped and lobotomized their capabilities. At launch, most of these tools could practically generate anything you wanted, but that freedom was short-lived after explicit AI-generated images of popular celebrities started making rounds on social media, creating grounds for a myriad of lawsuits.

Image-generation tools, including Microsoft's Image Creator have been heavily censored making it difficult to even create a simple plain white image. Up until recently, you couldn't generate an image of a glass of wine filled to the brim using ChatGPT, but OpenAI's new image-generation tool for the chatbot has dismissed this claim.

Users who've interacted with ChatGPT's new image-generation tool have echoed similar sentiments on social media. For context, the tool lets you generate images from scratch or transform existing ones to meet your preferences. It's also worth noting that it's powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o model for more accurate and detailed images compared to its predecessor, DALL-E 3.

Users have shared images generated using ChatGPT's GPT-4o powered image-generation tool, and it's honestly extremely hard to demystify AI-generated images from what's real.

However, AI skeptics suggest the hype around OpenAI's unhinged image-generation tool will be short-lived. And for good reasons, too. Image generation is a powerful tool which can be used for good, but it can also be misused to spread propaganda and spread misinformation.

ChatGPT-4o's image generation capabilities could warrant regulation

Toward the just-concluded US Presidential election, Grok attracted the attention of anti-trust watchdogs for all the wrong reasons. xAI reportedly trained Grok AI with X data without user consent.

The issue opened up the company to scrutiny, which almost cost X up to 4% of its global annual turnover. This was dependent on the company's ability to establish a legal basis for using users' X data to train Grok without authorization.

New Open Ai image gen seems to have no celebrity restrictions from r/singularity

Over the past few days, users have been having too much fun with ChatGPT's new image generation tool with some blatantly indicating that OpenAI was seemingly lenient with censorship on the tool in comparison with rivals in the space, including Copilot.

However, they've expressed concerns that the unrestricted image generation capabilities will soon be capped. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemingly corroborated this theory at the product's launch:

"People are going to create some really amazing stuff and some stuff that may offend people; what we'd like to aim for is that the tool doesn't create offensive stuff unless you want it to, in which case within reason it does. As we talk about in our model spec, we think putting this intellectual freedom and control in the hands of users is the right thing to do, but we will observe how it goes and listen to society."

Users have established that OpenAI's new image generation tool for ChatGPT doesn't have restrictions for most celebrities. A Reddit user indicated, "They probably realized Grok not giving a f**k gives them a huge advantage because people love memeing celebrities."

In the long-run, OpenAI could find itself in the corridors of justice, fighting lawsuits over its AI tool generating explicit and distasteful images of celebrities. It'll be interesting to see how OpenAI manages to maintains the status quo to compete with the likes of Grok on an even playing field.