OpenAI is reporting the pricing for image generation (https://openai.com/api/pricing/) very confusingly in the form of tokens, but looking at the documentation it translates the generated image dimensions and quality into tokens and the advanced pricing page does the math for you. https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing

A generated `medium` 1024x1024 is $0.04/image, which is in the same class as Imagen 3 and Flux 1.1 Pro, although who knows what a "medium" image is, or if the images that went viral from the ChatGPT UI were using `medium` or `high`. Testing from their new playground (https://platform.openai.com/playground/images), the medium images are indeed lower quality and still take 15 seconds to generate: https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1915114021466017830

Honestly in my anecdotal experience so far, it's been about the same as smaller and cheaper tools like HiDream that we can host and control ourselves.

I'm also getting a surprisingly high number of refusals for everything from stylistic representation to topics that are only lightly controversial like government/military.

e.g. I'm unable to get this to generate a drone "target" for infantry practice. This is surprising given OpenAI's ongoing IL4 efforts. I don't know why they would take this sort of Anthropic-esque "ethics" stance, especially given there are already several companies selling the above to the DoD.

It's a huge failure mode if people end up using CN-developed open source AI models for US government & military use cases because software engineers at our own AI labs are taking holier-than-thou ethics stances.

with such a high price, isn't it better to use the chatGPT plus membership instead?

but this is assuming they won't nerf the chatGPT version

Just a heads up. Looks like they have an additional step in the form of some kind of biometric identification if you want access to the new gpt-image-1 from the API:

https://withpersona.com/customers/openai

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...