On September 8, OpenAI rolled out Images 2.5, the new version of its image generation model built into ChatGPT. The version bump looks incremental, but the more interesting shift is in the interaction: you can now doodle right inside the chat box and have the AI generate an image from your sketch.
From typing to drawing: what Sketch changes
OpenAI's official announcement puts it plainly: sometimes the clearest way to explain an idea is by drawing it. The new Sketch feature follows that logic — type @Sketch in ChatGPT, a canvas pops up, and you can sketch a room layout, the contour of an outfit, or just a stick figure, then add a short style description. The model turns the rough drawing into a complete image.
A Verge editor tested it by drawing a rather rough cat with a computer mouse; the model still produced a realistic photo per the instructions, and kept refining details based on comments (The Verge). The point: a composition like "sofa on the left, floor-to-ceiling window on the right" used to take rounds of textual prompt-tuning; now you can just draw the spatial relationship and let words handle style and details.
Two companion features shipped alongside: Templates, which provide starting frameworks for popular formats like flyers and product photos; and comment-based editing, which lets the model change only the marked parts of an image instead of rewriting the whole prompt.
The model itself: faster and steadier
Per OpenAI's official claims, Images 2.5 cuts image generation latency by up to 50% compared with Images 2.0, produces more natural lighting and richer textures, better preserves the likeness of people, pets and objects from reference photos, and keeps details more consistent across multi-turn edits. TechRepublic and PCMag both confirmed the numbers, with TechRepublic noting that Axios — which had early access — tested it by designing a tattoo and iterating a logo through several rounds of notes without losing the original concept.
Images 2.5 is available now to ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex users across desktop, mobile, and web, with no extra signup required.
Commentary: the parameter race is giving way to an interaction race
My take: Sketch matters more than Images 2.5 itself. Halved latency and better textures are the routine arms race every image model is running; "doodle as prompt" lowers the barrier from "can you describe it" to "can you scribble two lines" — a dimensional drop at the interaction layer.
Comment-based editing essentially imports the annotation workflow from design collaboration into the chat box. Multi-turn consistency plus localized edits add up to a complete loop for conversational image editing — a far friendlier path for non-professionals than learning a full prompt-engineering toolkit.
A dose of realism: doodle input is not an OpenAI invention — sketch-to-image has been explored in the research community for years. What OpenAI did is productize it at the entry point used by hundreds of millions of users; the engineering value outweighs the invention value.
So what? If you generate images regularly, spend two minutes trying @Sketch. If you build AI products, note the signal: multimodal input is turning from a model capability into a UI default, and the next round of competition is happening at the interaction layer.