Since its debut last September, OpenAI’s Dall-E 3 image generator has remained accessible only to its Plus, Teams, and Enterprise subscribers. However, nearly a year on, Dall-E is now within reach for the rest of us, albeit with some rather strict limitations.

“We’re introducing the capacity for ChatGPT Free users to create up to two images daily with DALL·E 3. Just ask ChatGPT to create an image for a slide deck, personalize a card for a friend, or show you what something looks like. pic.twitter.com/3csFTscA5I” – OpenAI (@OpenAI) August 8, 2024

You’ll be granted a mere two images generated for you each day. It’s not completely insignificant, but it’s also not a substantial amount, especially when you consider that you can generate images freely to your heart’s content on Microsoft Copilot, which operates on the exact same GPT-4o model as ChatGPT. Google’s Gemini also enables its free-tier users to create images, but Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 does not – currently, it can only analyze uploaded pictures.

Generating images with ChatGPT in the free tier is no distinct from doing so previously with the paid subscriptions. Make sure you’re utilizing the GPT-4 model (as long as you haven’t recently reached your daily usage limit for ChatGPT, you should be fine), then simply type your request into the context window and await the AI to perform its task.

Just as with providing text-based prompts, you’ll need to be explicit in your instructions and offer as much concise context as possible. The more detailed you can be about what you want Dall-E to create, the more accurate the AI will be in its first attempt.

According to OpenAI, the feature is currently being rolled out to all users, although I was able to access it while this article was being composed. When I requested “draw a picture of a cat – it should be a line drawing with no color or fill” – the AI worked for approximately 10 seconds before presenting a perfectly acceptable line drawing of a cat, as requested.

Asking the system to give the cat stripes returned the image at the top of the post and exhausted my remaining image generation request for the day.