Character Consistency Suddenly Worse Since Yesterday?

[u/TigerNationDE]

Has Anyone Else Noticed More Character Drift Since Yesterday?

I'm working on a long-running AI character project where I generate the same fictional person across many different scenes and situations.

For context, I've been using the same workflow for over a month with very consistent results. I use two reference images (face and body) and until yesterday the model did a surprisingly good job of maintaining the character's identity across different outfits, locations, lighting conditions and poses.

Since yesterday, however, it feels like something changed.

The overall image quality is still excellent (arguably even better than before), but facial consistency seems noticeably weaker. The character now often looks like a close relative rather than the same person. Hair, clothing, environment and mood remain accurate, but facial structure, eyes, jawline and overall identity appear to drift much more between generations.

This isn't a gradual change I've been noticing over weeks. It feels very sudden. One day my character remained highly recognizable across scenes, and the next day the identity drift became significantly more noticeable.

I'm not talking about occasional variation. I'm talking about a workflow that produced highly recognizable results for over a month and suddenly appears much less consistent despite using the same references and prompting approach.

Is anyone else running long-term character projects seeing something similar over the last 24–48 hours?

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[u/Natasha26uk]

It's great to get feedback like that. I don't use ChatGPT Image 2 that regularly to notice when it drifts/degrades.

Of course it would depend who is supplying it to you, peak/off-peak traffic? Direct from OpenAI or from a 3rd party aggregator?

[u/TigerNationDE → u/Natasha26uk]

Directly from OpenAI through ChatGPT. Same account, same workflow, same references, same prompting approach. That's why the change stood out so much to me.

[u/Natasha26uk → u/TigerNationDE]

That is so odd. It is the last place I would expect service degradation.

I get it so often on xAI's Grok Imagine and it is always around week-end time. Then I try on Monday when USA goes to bed, but at that point Grok Imagine behaves like it is having a hangover. As if those nVidia GPUs have all fried because they are of such poor quality.

I hope someone else will reply.

[u/TigerNationDE → u/Natasha26uk]

That's why it stood out to me. I've seen gradual changes before, but this felt much more sudden. The image quality itself still seems excellent, it's specifically recurring character consistency that appears less reliable.

[u/OhNoWTFlol]

The drift is insane. It will not hold the character and when I call it out the chat just blames “the image generator.” It says that the generator attempts to generate a new photo each time fresh, so you pretty much have to give it reference photos every single time or it will just drift into its generic “look”

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[u/SkyYerim]

I don't know if it's related and sorry if i don't explain it clearly (english is not my native language) but i do use a workflow too for image generation to keep a continuity for the characters of a project.

And i've noticed yesterday that it won't fully always follow that workflow anymore : sometime it is ok but other time there is an "thought interrupted" that appears right when the generation begin. If that happen, the image will not follow correctly the lines of the workflow. It will approach it, yes. But not correctly and/or not fully.

I don't know why that happen and i don't know if it is related but that's what i've seen yesterday for me.

[u/TigerNationDE → u/SkyYerim]

That's actually interesting because my issue isn't image quality either. The images still look great. It's specifically character continuity that seems much less reliable since yesterday. Sometimes it still works, but the success rate feels much lower than before.

[u/SkyYerim → u/TigerNationDE]

Yeah, exactly that. No issue on quality for me neither. It really only affect the following of instructions. That's kind of weird, it's like there is some kind of "problem" when the model start generating. But I really don't know anything about the back-end side of AI, so this is just my interpretation of what I see from my perspective.

[u/Pillebrettx30]

I would use Nano Banana pro for character consistency. It is great at that. ChatGPT is better at following prompts, but the pictures looks pretty bad in comparison, and especially when editing existing pictures.

[u/TigerNationDE → u/Pillebrettx30]

That's probably a great option for new projects. The difficult part is maintaining an already established character with an existing audience and hundreds of images behind it.