ChatGPT, AI images, factory farming, DALL-E 3
Cows eat through a metal barrier in a Polish cattle shed, much like images ChatGPT's old tool made with its editing step blocked Mikinisk via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

ChatGPT's former default image generator, DALL·E 3, drew dairy farms as green pasture in 94% of pictures, even when asked to show what most farms look like. Pig farms appeared outdoors in 91% of cases. An automatic prompt-rewriting step largely erased indoor farming from the pictures, a study of 4,800 images found.

In rich countries, most livestock live indoors, on so-called factory farms. Fewer than 3% of US lactating cows are primarily kept on pasture, the authors note. US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data from 2012 found that more than 99% of nursery and grower/finisher pigs were housed in facilities with no outdoor access. When researchers inhibited prompt revision, 96% of pig farm images showed animals indoors.

How a Hidden Rewrite Changed the Pictures

GPT-4 rewrote short requests and passed the fuller prompts to DALL·E 3 for image generation. For a plain request such as 'A dairy farm', that rewrite produced cows grazing on pasture every time. Pig farm requests became outdoor scenes in 99% of cases. One rewritten prompt began 'Picture a vast field of lush, green grass under a clear blue sky'. The authors say ChatGPT users were not told about this step.

A study of 4,800 AI-generated images found that ChatGPT depicted dairy farms as idyllic pastures in 100% of cases and pig farms in 99%. When automatic prompt rewriting was bypassed, 60% of dairy farm images and 96% of pig farm images depicted intensive indoor farming instead.
by u/Phylogenix in science

The team then added a line from OpenAI's own developer guide, ending 'DO NOT add any detail, just use it AS-IS'. When researchers inhibited prompt revision, 60% of dairy images showed cows indoors, eating through metal barriers. Pigs appeared behind metal railings on concrete floors. Pasture appeared in just 4% of American dairy images, near the real figure. The base model could draw modern farms all along, the researchers say.

What the Researchers Say the Bias Means

OpenAI built the rewriting step to make its images fairer and more varied, the authors acknowledge. 'In the case of livestock farming, it has introduced more bias,' they write. OpenAI has not published its full rewriting rules, they say. The authors cite two March 2024 screenshots in which ChatGPT refused requests to depict battery cages, apparently treating the practice as sensitive content. The study does not establish whether the bias was deliberate.

The researchers compared images classed as indoors or outdoors, excluding examples they could not clearly categorise. Even the indoor pictures showed clean, healthy animals, with pigs' tails still curly. The work focused only on Western farming. Computer-made pictures have skewed searches before: fake baby peacocks crowded out real ones in image search results, the paper notes. The team warns that farm scenes could follow, feeding future models and misleading users.

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Does Today's ChatGPT Draw Farms the Same Way?

That is unclear. The study tested DALL·E 3 through OpenAI's developer access. OpenAI made GPT-4o image generation ChatGPT's default on 10 April 2025 and launched ChatGPT Images 2.6 on 4 November 2026. The main findings focus on DALL·E 3, so they may not apply to today's ChatGPT.

Lead author Kehan Sheng, of the University of British Columbia, told the animal welfare site Sentient Media the rewrite was 'erasing all the reality'. Her team wants ChatGPT to tell users it rewrites prompts. The researchers' images and data are public so others can repeat the test.

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