The arrival of OpenAI's DALL-E 2 in the spring of 2022 marked a turning point in AI, when text-to-image generation suddenly became accessible to a select group of users, creating a community of digital explorers who experienced wonder and controversy as the technology automated the act of visual creation.

OpenAI is rolling out a new image generator powered by its flagship GPT-4o model, and it nails rendering text.

When DALL-E first launched, it lived on its standalone website; since then, it has moved to ChatGPT. The move came with many benefits, including the ability to ask the AI chatbot for an image you want in the same interface where you are already chatting about something else, thereby eliminating the need for constant context switching.