ChatGPT gained one million new users in an hour today

OpenAI has been doubling its audience for ChatGPT at a rapid rate, and the addition of its latest image generation feature has increased the AI assistant’s popularity. Today, CEO Sam Altman posted to X that the service “added one million users in the last hour,” calling it a “biblical demand” for the image generation.

When the company announced the rollout of image generation in ChatGPT last week, the tool was meant to be available to all user tiers. However, the high degree of interest meant that access for free users was walked back. Now, the company is reporting “issues with new signups,” which has been its status for more than a day.

While ChatGPT’s ability to create original images has been a delight (and occasional horror show) for users, the AI platform continues to draw the ire of artists and creatives. Many of these people have their work taken, either as training material for the large-language model scraped from the internet or improperly taken and modified by ChatGPT users, without any credit or compensation. One of the more visible examples have been the many memes image inspired by the animation style of Studio Ghibli. Altman is currently using one such image as his X profile photo, but other users have used ChatGPT to apply the look of the studio’s films to violent or triggering content, raising a fresh round of questions about how creators can protect their work from misuse.