ChatGPT's new image editor is making waves on the internet. While it's incredibly powerful when given the proper prompts, if left to its own devices, it seems to want to turn everything into something out of Studio Ghibli.
But if you guide the image editor in the right direction, it can do some incredible things. I decided to take a photo of my family and feed it to ChatGPT to see what cartoon and gaming art styles I could turn us into. with the image editor's help.
The AI chatbot's content policy slapped down some of my ideas, but with a bit of creativity, I changed myself, my girlfriend, and her son into all kinds of cool cartoon art styles.
The original image
The base image was simple — just my family and I showing off a bunch of Sunday Swagger golf polos that matched (the family that golfs together and all that).
Using ChatGPT to turn people into Lego
This one was easy, as the content policy didn't seem to have any issues turning us into Lego. Here's what I asked ChatGPT 4o to do for this one:
"Turn the people in this image into Lego characters."
I think it did a tremendous job with this one. You can immediately look at the image and tell that my family and I are Lego people while still recognizing the key elements of the image, such as our hats, the paint splatter on the polos and even my girlfriend's hair color.
Using ChatGPT to turn people into Minecraft characters
This was another one where ChatGPT didn't give me any issues regarding content policy, which was nice. Here's the prompt I used:
"Turn the people in this image into Minecraft characters."
Again, ChatGPT did a great job with Minecraft. I could easily see all of these of us running around with diamond pickaxes in hand while building blocky houses and fighting creepers.
It's funny that it gave my girlfriend's son paint splattered pants even though it was just the shirt, but other than that, the image came out great.
Using ChatGPT to turn people into Mario / 8bit characters
This was the first one I ran into problems with, as ChatGPT refused to let me make my family into Mario characters no matter what I did. I tried "Turn the people in this image into Mario characters," but to no avail.
I tried "Turn the people in this image into characters that look like they could be in a Mario game," to see if that was less of an issue.
Still no luck. After trying a bunch of variations, I ended up with the following:
"Turn the people in this image into characters that look like they could be in an 8-bit video game."
While not exactly the Mario look-and-feel I originally had in mind, it still came out really well and looks like we're an old-school Nintendo game while still retaining enough details to make us recognizable.
Other fun ChatGPT cartoon styles
I had a few other styles that I tried, some worked perfectly, others were shot down by the content system. Check out the gallery below to see some of the other ones that worked well including Muppets, "South Park" and more.
I tired as many prompts as I could come up with to get "Simpsons" characters with my family photo and no matter what, it just wouldn't work. It would generate most of the image and then delete it, citing the content policy.
ChatGPT image generator outlook
Overall, I think the ChatGPT image generator is in a good place. While it might like to create Studio Ghibli when left alone, if you guide it in the right direction, you can get what you want.
Give it a try, and you might be surprised at what you can make.
More from Tom's Guide
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
