Amid all the fuss over DeepSeek, OpenAI has pushed out o3-mini, a new AI reasoning model available to all ChatGPT users. The mass roll out means people are already putting it to intriguing uses, which includes making an image-to-ASCII art converter.
There's no shortage of ASCII art generators online, but product designer Mike Bespalov's tool avoids the limitations of many of the basic converters and provides plenty of parameters to play with. Warning: you may become addicted.
Mike is the founder of the product UI-focused online library referodesign. Writing on X, he says it took him just an hour to build an image-to-ASCII art converter using Open AI's new AI model "The exact tool I’ve always wanted. And it works so well," Mike writes. Within a day, he had it online with the name Monospace, and people were sharing the images they created in the responses to his post.
Mike says older AI models could already build a tool like Monospace, but the result would require rewrites, debugging. With o3, it took just a few prompts, and it worked off the bat.
"The interface is a bit technical," Mike writes on X I might clean it up, give it a proper UI, and launch it as a real website at some point. No promises, but who knows,"
You can try the ASCII art generator online . You simply upload an image, and the tool will immediately convert it to ASCII art. You can then play with the contrast, brightness and blur level, invert the colours and change the dithering options and character set or enable edge detection.
OpenAI o3-mini was designed to be faster and more accurate than the last iteration, o1-mini. It's also the first time that OpenAI has given free access to a small reasoning LLM to all ChatGPT users.
To use o3-mini, select 'Reason' in the ChatGPT message composer. There are three options, low, medium and high. For more on AI, catch up with the US Copyright Office stance on AI art.
What is ASCII art?
A descendant of typewriter art and line-printer art, ASCII art is a technique that uses printable characters instead of grapahic marks. Traditionally, ASCII Standard and ASCII compliant characters would be used, although the term is now often used more loosely to refer to art using other character sets.
ASCII art was mainly invented to be able to produce art using early printers, and it was also used to mark divisions between print jobs It would later be used in emails and text messages before it became possible to embed or send images. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, usually with a fixed-width font (see our pick of the best monospace fonts.
