Image Editor Missteps Reported
Users are reporting basic failures in OpenAI’s new image‑editing feature — for example, commands like “remove everything in the selected area” reportedly fail in practice, prompting people to recommend switching to alternatives like Claude for certain edits (x.com). The complaints surfaced on social threads alongside comparisons that highlight differing tool behavior on straightforward editing instructions (x.com).
OpenAI’s image editor is drawing user complaints that simple selection-based edits are not working as advertised, including requests to remove everything inside a highlighted area. (help.openai.com) OpenAI’s help documentation says the ChatGPT Images editor lets users click a generated image, select part of it, and “describe your changes in chat.” A separate help page says the Select tool is available from the top-right corner of an image in ChatGPT. (help.openai.com 1) (help.openai.com 2) Those instructions frame the feature as a basic inpainting tool: mark a region, tell the model what to change, and leave the rest alone. OpenAI’s API guide likewise says its image models can “generate or edit images,” putting edits and fresh generations in the same product line. (help.openai.com) (developers.openai.com) The complaints surfaced after OpenAI expanded its newer ChatGPT Images system. OpenAI said in its January 2026 product post that the upgraded image model was rolling out to all ChatGPT users and promised “more precise edits” and “consistent details.” (openai.com) That promise matters because image editing is a narrower task than image generation. A user asking to erase objects inside a selected box is not asking for a new composition; they are asking for local changes while the surrounding image stays stable. (help.openai.com) (openai.com) Users comparing outputs have pointed to Anthropic’s Claude as an alternative for some edits, but Anthropic’s public product pages emphasize Claude’s reasoning, coding, and computer-use features rather than a dedicated image-editing workflow like OpenAI’s selection tool. (anthropic.com 1) (anthropic.com 2) OpenAI’s public status page did not show a current platform-wide incident affecting ChatGPT when checked on April 13, 2026. That does not rule out model-quality problems, but it does suggest the reports are about behavior inside the feature rather than a broad outage. (status.openai.com) OpenAI has also kept iterating on the image stack around ChatGPT. Its help center says users can still access an older GPT-4o image generator through a separate GPT even after broader model changes in ChatGPT, which means some side-by-side comparisons may involve different image systems as well as different companies’ tools. (help.openai.com 1) (help.openai.com 2) For now, the gap is straightforward: OpenAI’s documentation says users can select an area and edit it, while some users are posting examples that say the editor is missing on basic cleanup requests. OpenAI’s next move is likely to be judged less on image flair than on whether a simple erase command works every time. (help.openai.com) (openai.com)
