OpenAI has updated ChatGPT's image guardrails ahead of the US midterms: requests depicting election interference or voter suppression now come back as illustrations or cartoons rather than photorealistic images, and explicit requests for a realistic version are blocked. The change, added in an October update to OpenAI's elections post, is meant to strip generated scenes of documentary weight while preserving illustration and social commentary.

CNET's tests found the filter holding on pointed prompts — federal agents outside a polling place, a voting machine recording the wrong choice — each returned as a cartoon. OpenAI's head of elections, Josh Lawson, said the aim is to “degrade the evidentiary value of an image, while preserving room for illustrations and social commentary,” and to make the platform less useful to bad actors.

The guardrail does not cover every kind of fake: a NewsGuard audit last week found ChatGPT Images 2.5 still produced realistic, compromising images of midterm candidates in 16 of 20 tests. The cartoon rule targets interference and suppression scenes specifically, not candidate imagery in general.