My pet theory is that OpenAI screwed up the image normalization calculation and was stuck with the mistake since that's something that can't be worked around.

At the least, it's not present in these new images.

Meta's codec avatars all have a green cast because they spent millions on the rig to capture whole bodies and even more on rolling it out to get loads of real data.

They forgot to calibrate the cameras, so everything had a green tint.

Meanwhile all the other teams had a billion macbeth charts lying around just in case.

Not really, but there's a number of theories. The simplest one is that they "style tuned" the AI on human preference data, and this introduced a subtle bias for yellow.

And I say "subtle" - but because that model would always "regenerate" an image when editing, it would introduce more and more of this yellow tint with each tweak or edit. Which has a way of making a "subtle" bias anything but.

My pet theory is that this is the "Mexico filter" from movies leaking through the training data.

I never heard anything concrete offered. At least it's relatively easy to work around with a tone mapping / LUTs.

There's definitely an analysis on the net somewhere, can't remember the details though.

maybe their version of synth-id? it at least helps me spot gpt images vs gemini's

I'm guessing that it was intentional all along, as no other models exhibit this behavior. It was so it could be instantly recognized as ChatGPT

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Colloquially called the urine filter

Not always, it started at a very specific point. Studio Ghibli craze + reinforcement learning on the likes.