ChatGPT Plus users reporting issues since the DALL-E 3 upgrade

ChatGPT users are struggling to generate images since OpenAI announced new updates.

An OpenAI spokesperson said all systems are fully operational, which matches up with its status monitoring site. Yet, reported problems spiked around 2 p.m. ET Tuesday, according to Down Detector (which is also owned by Mashable's parent company Ziff Davis) and have continued to show high outage reports.

Mashable employees experienced errors in generating images around the same time. Users on the ChatGPT subreddit also reported issues. Several users pointed out that ChatGPT wouldn't generate images despite the new integration with DALL-E 3.

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Despite successfully generating images for Saira Mueller, a freelance editor who works with Mashable, last night, ChatGPT told her this afternoon that it didn't have the capacity to generate images.

It then backpedaled after Mueller expressed her confusion and said it could, but didn't actually generate anything. Instead, it mused about what to include in a prompt: "To create an image of a photorealistic landscape on another planet, please provide any specific details you'd like to include, such as the type of terrain, the presence of any celestial bodies in the sky, vegetation, or color scheme preferences."

When Mueller followed up, it showed an error message.

A Mashable editor ultimately got an error message after ChatGPT failed to generate an image. Credit: Screenshot: Mashable / OpenAI

At OpenAI's developer conference on Monday, CEO Sam Altman announced ChatGPT would be doing away with the model selection dropdown, which featured the DALL-E, internet browser, and plugins options. Instead these would all be integrated within the standard interface for ChatGPT Plus users.

Users with the updated integration are the ones experiencing the issues. It's unconfirmed whether OpenAI has deployed the updates, causing the outages, but given the timeline announced by Altman yesterday, this would match up.

Mashable has reached out to OpenAI for more information and will update this story if it hears back.