OpenAI has added GIF creation to ChatGPT, and it arrived with the company’s new image model. Users can now turn a prompt or a photo into a short animation inside the chatbot. The feature rolled out alongside Images 2.6 this week.
The change removes a small but real annoyance. Before this update, ChatGPT could not produce a GIF in a single step. People had to generate frames elsewhere and stitch them together by hand.
The company shared a simple example. A user types “can you make a gif of a cat dancing?” and ChatGPT returns the animation. It also offers controls to adjust playback speed and step through individual frames.
Speed control matters more than it sounds. GIFs often look wrong at the wrong frame rate, and fixing that used to mean opening another tool. Now the adjustment sits next to the output itself.
OpenAI says Images 2.6 also makes image generation faster across ChatGPT. The company reports that users now create more than 4 billion images per week across ChatGPT and its API. That is up from 3 billion per week in September.
The rollout covers web, desktop, and mobile apps. Codex users get the same access, which ties the visual features to OpenAI’s coding product. The company is also shipping GPT-Image-2.6 Flare and Sunburst through its API.
Those API models target developers who need faster output and higher quality. Both names suggest OpenAI is splitting the model line for different workloads. Flare and Sunburst are not consumer features, and they will not appear in the chat interface.
The bigger signal is where OpenAI is pushing consumer AI. Images have become one of the company’s most-used outputs after text. Animated GIFs are a cheap addition that makes the product feel more complete.
Source: The Verge — ChatGPT will now make you animated GIFs.
Related reading: Nothing’s first screen-free AI device arrives in December and Qualcomm bets on data centers as phone sales fall.
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