Has anyone else experienced a major drop in GPT Image quality over the last few days?

Before this started, I was consistently getting detailed images with strong linework, texture, shading, composition, and good adherence to my references. Now the results look noticeably flatter, more generic, and much less accurate.

I’ve attached two images for comparison. Both were created using the same prompt and the same general workflow, just on different days. The first image is what I was getting before. The second image is what I’m getting now.

The generator is not technically down because the images still complete, but the quality has dropped so much that the results are no longer usable for my work.

I’ve already tested this in a new conversation, incognito mode, another browser, another device, directly in ChatGPT, and through Magnific using GPT Image. The same issue keeps happening, so it does not seem like a cache or browser problem.

Has anyone else noticed this? Could this be related to model routing or the recent image-generation incidents?

Hey Mindbender777, welcome to the forum!

I agree that's inconvenient. I've been generating images almost every day lately across different plans and haven't noticed a difference.

Just to help rule a few things out, could you try a different prompt—perhaps asking for a realistic person instead of a cartoon—and see if that works?

If the issue still persists after that, it may be account-specific.

Avinash

Adding to the great advice here, @Mindbender777 to check this topic, if it would be of help too:

Here is a collection of tips and tricks and some weaknesses and limits too, focused on the technical part of the GPT-image-generator. It takes quite some time to realize relatively simple things. This might help save some time when experimenting. Ugly, broken, incorrect or boring test images are also allowed here. It is less about creativity, aesthetics and good ideas, and more about probing the models for weaknesses on a technical level. The first post includes all the findings, and will be u…

Thanks, I appreciate the response.

The reason I don’t think this is just a prompt issue is because we’ve been using this same style and workflow to generate thousands of images, and it has consistently produced a fairly similar look over time.

Ever since image generation went down two days ago, something has clearly changed. The same style of prompts and references now gives results that are noticeably worse and much less consistent than before.

I also don’t think this is account-specific because I’m seeing the same problem both on my own ChatGPT Pro account and through a separate API platform using the image model there as well. That’s why this feels more like a broader change that started after the outage.

Thank you, I’ll take a look at that thread. What makes this stand out to me is that we’ve already used this same style across thousands of generations, so I have a pretty strong sense of what the output normally looks like. It usually stayed fairly consistent, but ever since the outage two days ago, the results have changed a lot. That’s why it feels less like normal variation and more like something shifted after the downtime.