Image generation hits four billion a week

The Images 2.6 thread opened with a commenter shocked at the figure of four billion images per week. Another noted that the grid trick, generating a sheet of frames and using them as animation, has existed for a while and was not specific to ChatGPT, and said they were surprised an official provider took this long to ship it natively.

That detail matters. A hack that hobbyists passed around becomes a first-party feature, and the wrapper products built on the hack lose their reason to exist.

The volume figure suggests image generation is now a mass-market default rather than a novelty, which also feeds the slop worries showing up elsewhere in the discussion.