Summary

No, ChatGPT cannot create images. However, you can use it to help you create prompts for AI image generators.

ChatGPT is capable of many writing feats, and you might wonder if it can generate images. ChatGPT does not function as an AI image generator, but other AI services can generate images—and ChatGPT can even give you a hand.

Stable Diffusion “a robot eating a taco”

Can You Use ChatGPT as a Picture Generator?

ChatGPTcannot generate images—not as of May, 2023, at least. However, there are quite a fewAI image generatorsout there, such asDALL-E,Stable Diffusion, and more.

With that said, you can still use ChatGPT to help you generate images: use it to come up with solid image-generation prompts for art-based AI models.

The Dream by WOMBO AI image generator creating an image of a 4-dimensional whale.

While ChatGPT can’t generate images,Microsoft’s Bing Chat featureis based on the same GPT-4 model that underlies ChatGPT Plus, and it includes an AI image generator named theBing Image Creator.

In the future, ChatGPT Plus users may get access toChatGPT plug-insthat will let ChatGPT generate images.

Someone asking ChatGPT to come up with a Stable Diffusion image generation prompt about a dragon.

Related:Bing Chat: How to Use the AI Chatbot

Can You Use Images for ChatGPT Prompts?

No, you cannot provide an image as a ChatGPT prompt. ChatGPT is not connected to the web and has no way to access images. (ChatGPT can browse the web with plugins, but that’s it.)

You can paste any URL into ChatGPT, and ChatGPT may pretend to be able to see the URL—just likeChatGPT may pretend to give you reminders—but ChatGPT can’t access it. ChatGPT may sometimes appear to see images and other web resources, but ChatGPT is likely “guessing” based on the structure of the URL.  For example, if you ask ChatGPT what the photo as www.example.com/blue-flower.jpg is, ChatGPT may say, “That’s a blue flower”—just from the textual information you’ve just given it.

A surrealistic red dragon image created by Stable Diffusion.

How to Get AI-Generated Images

There are manyAI image generatorsout there—with more being developed and released regularly. Here are some of the most popular ones:

Related:The Best AI Image Generators You Can Use Right Now

How to Use AI Image Generators

Despite the plethora of AI image generators out there, they all work similarly. You need to come up with a prompt that describes the image you want. The more detailed your prompt is, the better the chance that you’ll get a nice image.

However, there are no guarantees, as all AI models can only create new images based on existing images that they have already seen and analyzed. If the sample size for a particular subject is low, then the AI model will have trouble coming up with an image that matches your prompt.

For example, if you input a prompt like “A 4-dimensional whale in space eating a bunch of electric krill” into Dream, the AI is going to struggle with the “4-dimensional” aspect, as that’s a concept that’s hard to illustrate, and the “electric krill” part, as, currently, there’s no such thing as electric krill.

In addition to playing around with keywords and phrasing for your prompts, you can use AI models to help you come up with better prompts.

How to Use ChatGPT To Create AI Art Prompts

ChatGPT can help you write and develop AI art prompts, however. There are four main components that you need to think about when getting ChatGPT to create a prompt for an image-generation AI:

Here’s an example of a prompt we created using the above-mentioned criteria:

We then put our ChatGPT-created prompt into Stable Diffusion, and this is what we got:

Not bad. There are a few elements missing, however: Stable Diffusion probably doesn’t have a great selection of examples for “genies being exhaled by a dragon,” so we can forgive it in that regard. With that said, the subject in the image is clearly a red dragon, there is a definite focus on the color yellow, and the style is certainly reminiscent of Salvidor Dali’s paintings.