India has emerged as the largest market for OpenAI’s Images 2.0 model, the San Francisco-based company announced in 2026, just weeks after the text-to-image generation tool launched inside ChatGPT.
OpenAI said Indian users are applying the model well beyond basic photo editing, with adoption driven heavily by self-expression and pop culture rather than workplace productivity. The company noted the trend is especially pronounced among younger users experimenting with identity, aesthetics, and online storytelling.
The top use cases OpenAI identified in India include: transforming everyday photos into studio-style portraits (Universal Lighting); generating polished LinkedIn-ready headshots; converting selfies into anime and manga-style avatars; creating AI-generated fashion transformations (Style Me); designing fictional newspaper covers featuring the user; producing tarot card-inspired portraits; generating architectural and room redesign concepts (Blueprint); restoring older or low-quality photos (Enhance); and experimenting with paparazzi-style and soft pastel seasonal imagery. OpenAI also noted a rise in country-specific prompt styles, including cinematic portrait collages and Y2K romantic portraits.
Images 2.0 follows a competitive stretch for OpenAI in the image generation space. The company’s earlier viral moment came with the GPT-4o native image generation launch, which sparked a widespread Studio Ghibli portrait trend in India. That momentum faded after Google’s Gemini Nano Banana model outperformed ChatGPT on benchmarks and real-world use cases, offering faster output, better character consistency, and more advanced editing tools. OpenAI’s interim Images 1.5 release did not close that gap, according to the source.
With Images 2.0, OpenAI introduced reasoning capabilities that allow the model to work through prompts and draw on real-time web data. For Indian users specifically, the model has improved its handling of non-English text, enabling the creation of promotional content and memes in Hindi and other supported Indian languages without text rendering errors.
Source: mint – technology