AI Thumbnail Generator

AI Thumbnail Generator

Turn a title or a story into a thumbnail people actually click: an AI-generated emotional close-up face with a bold hook headline burned across the lower third. Built for YouTube, Shorts and Reels covers, TikTok, and ad creative, where the thumbnail does most of the work and you need a new one for every video.

How it works

It scans your title and story for emotional cues (betrayal, rage, shock, heartbreak, and a few others), picks the strongest match, and writes a short all-caps hook from the same text. That feeds a prompt to gpt-image-1, which renders a hyper-realistic face with deliberately empty space at the bottom. The image comes back text-free on purpose, then the hook is overlaid afterward with a real font so the type stays crisp instead of being mangled by the image model.

Input

You can run it with nothing but a title. Everything else is an override or a knob.

*At least one of title or story is needed, otherwise there's nothing to work from.

Output

One PNG per run, saved to the key-value store, with a record pushed to the dataset. The record includes output.imageUrl and output.imageKey for the file, plus emotion, hookText, aspectRatio, and size so you can see what it decided. If the text overlay fails for any reason, you still get the face image back without the headline rather than an error.

If you run without an openaiApiKey (the default keyless run), you get one clearly-labeled SAMPLE record instead — marked with _sample: true and a note explaining that no image was rendered. It carries the same fields (emotion, hookText, aspectRatio, size, imagePrompt) so you can preview the exact output shape before bringing your own key. It is still a dataset row, so it is billed at the normal $0.15.

Example

{
  "title": "AITA for refusing to pay for my sister's wedding?",
  "aspectRatio": "9:16",
  "imageQuality": "high",
  "openaiApiKey": "sk-..."
}

Pricing

$0.15 per dataset row, plus $0.0000125 each time a run starts, charged per GB of run memory — $0.00005 a run at this actor's default 4 GB.

The charge is per row written to the dataset, and this actor writes exactly one row per run either way. A run with your key writes the thumbnail record and costs $0.15. A keyless labeled SAMPLE run renders no image and calls no image API, but it still writes a row, so it also costs $0.15. Treat the sample as a paid preview of the output shape, not a free trial.

Pay per result, no subscription. The image generation runs on your own OpenAI key, so that usage is billed to you separately by OpenAI.

Notes

It needs an OpenAI key with gpt-image-1 access. Emotion detection is keyword-based, so it lands well on emotionally loaded story titles (relationship drama, AITA-style posts) and is less sure on dry or abstract ones. When auto-detection guesses wrong, set emotion and hookText directly.