A photographer trained ChatGPT to do his outsourced photo editing

It took one day and about $20 for a photographer to teach ChatGPT the job he used to pay a human editor for.

A day of training

In a post on r/OpenAI, a photographer describes teaching the ChatGPT desktop app to edit his photos in Photoshop and Lightroom Classic. He started with RAW files, a reference photo edited by his usual retoucher and a written breakdown of his own techniques.

The first attempt came out rough. He showed the reference again and explained what was off, and the second pass improved sharply. Then he changed the loop: he began feeding the app screenshots of its own editing process together with the finished images, and quality kept climbing with each round. The whole exercise took about a day of iteration and $20 in credits.

Why this case is different

This is not a filter or a one-click enhancement. The desktop app operates real professional software the way an employee would, moving through Photoshop and Lightroom and learning one specific person’s style from examples.

That distinction matters for the labor question. Editing of this kind is tedious, repeatable and routinely outsourced, which makes it exactly the category of digital work that desktop agents absorb first. The photographer’s case also shows how low the barrier has become: no custom integration, no API work, just examples and feedback over a single day.

The open question is how far the approach stretches beyond photo editing. The same training loop, reference output plus critique plus screenshots of the tool’s own process, applies to most desktop software with a visible interface.