The model's ability to create diverse styles of images, including those reminiscent of Studio Ghibli, has contributed to its rapid adoption and popularity.

Since its introduction in March 2025, the model has gained immense popularity, attracting 130 million users who generated 700 million images within its first week.

Prominent companies such as Canva, GoDaddy, HubSpot, Instacart, and InVideo are actively exploring ways to integrate this image generation model to enhance their offerings.

OpenAI has recently launched the gpt-image-1 API, which allows developers to harness advanced image generation capabilities for a variety of creative applications.

Designed for ease of use, the API integrates seamlessly with tools like Python and Pillow, making it accessible for both novice and experienced developers.

This development signifies a shift in digital design towards a more text-driven creative process, moving away from traditional click-and-drag methods.

The API operates on a token-based pricing system, charging $5 per million input tokens for text, $10 for images, and $40 for output tokens, translating to costs of approximately 2 to 19 cents per generated image based on quality.

For high-detail images, additional tokens are required based on size and detail level, with typical costs ranging from $0.02 to $0.19 per image.

OpenAI's approach combines creative capabilities with robust safety features and flexible pricing, aiming to support the next generation of content-driven platforms.

To ensure compliance with safety standards, the API includes content moderation filters and all generated images are watermarked with C2PA metadata to identify them as AI-generated.

Despite its capabilities, the model has limitations, such as requiring account verification and imposing safety constraints on certain prompts to prevent inappropriate content.

These advancements are part of OpenAI's competitive strategy against Google, which has also introduced its own image generation capabilities with the Imagen 3 model.