ChatGPT Sketch turns your bad drawings into detailed AI images
OpenAI’s updated image generation tools in ChatGPT let you use a doodle as part of your prompt.
OpenAI’s updated image generation tools in ChatGPT let you use a doodle as part of your prompt.
by Sep 8, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC
Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Images 2.5 on Tuesday and is adding a new way to tell ChatGPT what you want it to make an image of: by drawing a doodle. With a new feature called Sketch, you can just draw something right inside ChatGPT and then tell ChatGPT how you want it to make an image based on that sketch.
You can activate the Sketch feature by typing @Sketch into your chat box, and a window will pop up where you can make your drawing. I briefly tested it, and it successfully turned my bad doodle of a cat that I drew with my computer mouse into a realistic photo, per my instructions. You can also now leave comments directly on parts of images that you want changed, which I used to make the cat’s eyes green instead of blue.
As for ChatGPT Images 2.5, OpenAI says that it makes images with “more natural lighting and richer textures,” is better at following your editing instructions “across multiple turns,” and that image generation latency has been reduced by “up to 50% compared with Images 2.0.” ChatGPT Images 2.5 is out now for ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex users on desktop, mobile, and web, according to OpenAI.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.