‘The noise patterns are awful’ — some Reddit users aren’t happy with the new ChatGPT Images 2.5, so I did my own tests and have to agree

There's some synthetic fuzz obscuring the sharpest images

10 Sep 2026, 11:14 by https://www.techradar.com/author/eric-hal-schwartz · TechRadar

Features By Eric Hal Schwartz Published 10 September 2026

(Image credit: ChatGPT Image 2.5)

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OpenAI launched ChatGPT Images 2.5 this week, boasting of impressive upgrades to the AI image creator. The company says its latest model delivers sharper details, more natural lighting, and richer textures, while doing a better job of preserving people and objects from reference photos. It is also supposed to generate images up to 50% faster and follow complex visual instructions more reliably.

There are plenty of genuinely useful additions around it, too. Images 2.5 introduces Sketch for turning rough drawings into finished images, templates for things such as posters and product photography, and the ability to leave comments directly on an image when requesting edits. OpenAI calls it its new state-of-the-art image model, which is a reasonably high bar to set for something that inevitably ends up being asked to draw dragons before breakfast.

The early reaction, though, is much less tidy. One Reddit user delivered perhaps the most memorable review so far: “The noise patterns are awful”. Another looked at an AI generation and decided, “This…looks terrible.” The complaint is easy to understand. It's all about the fuzz

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Everything is sharper, including the problem

Noise is a slightly slippery criticism when talking about AI images. In photography, it usually means the speckling or grain that creeps into an image with a poor match between lighting and photographic technique. But generative AI images can produce something similar without ever encountering a camera. Everything gets a gritty, sandy look, and nothing looks clean for some reason.

Noise is especially damaging because it can masquerade as detail. Generative models have learned that photographs contain grain, texture, tiny variations in color, and the occasional imperfection. Images 2.5 appears unusually eager to reproduce those signals, sometimes scattering them across skies, skin, feathers, and studio backdrops.

That's the opposite of the “sharper details” and “richer textures” promised by OpenAI. Despite emphasizing more natural lighting and textures, some users think ChatGPT Images 2.5 has moved backward.

“They need to get rid of these noisy artifacts. It makes it mostly useless for production,” one wrote. There is praise mixed in with the complaints, but it's far from the universal acclaim OpenAI would likely prefer.

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