- A Reddit user recreated an image of The Rock 101 times with ChatGPT
- What started as a bad recreation ended up as abstract art
- The trend is now facing some backlash due to the energy wasted by creating 101 images in a short space of time
There’s yet another new viral ChatGPT image generation trend, and this one might be the most pointless but also the most hilarious yet – especially when AI gets things horribly wrong.
You may have seen the new “Create the exact replica of this image, don’t change a thing“ prompt on social media over the last few days, where ChatGPT tries to recreate an image, often making subtle changes that just look a little weird.
One Reddit user took the ChatGPT trend to a whole new level by transforming an image of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, arguably one of the most famous people on the planet, into some weird form of abstract art that would have Picasso spinning in his grave.
How did they do it? By asking ChatGPT to recreate the image 101 times, each time using the newly generated AI creation as the starting point – you can watch the entire process in the Reddit video linked below.
I tried the “Create the exact replica of this image, don’t change a thing” 101 times, but with Dwayne Johnson 🗿 from r/ChatGPT
This makes me feel uneasy
What starts as a subtly different but poor recreation of The Rock gets weird very quickly as ChatGPT replaces his clothes, then his mouth; before you know it, all recognizable characteristics have disappeared, leaving a muddled mess.
The Reddit thread, at the time of writing, has 42,000 upvotes and nearly 3,000 comments. My favorite of which is, “ChatGPT, more like ChatLSD.”
New ChatGPT image trends are popping up daily, from the viral action figure to transforming your pet into a human; there’s something ridiculous, often fun, but equally completely pointless, taking social media by storm every week.
This ChatGPT trend is fascinating. Yes, it creates terrible results, but it’s intriguing to see the evolution of AI’s ability to recreate imagery. At some point we’ll likely have an AI model that can not only recreate as close to 1:1 as possible, but which, if we ask it to recreate the same image 101 times, might not end up producing something that looks like technicolor vomit on canvas.
The backlash
These AI image trends are facing increasing amounts of backlash, however, with many worried about the impact on the planet of using AI for meaningless fun.
One Reddit user created a thread pleading with the AI community to “Stop the 100x Image Generation Trend“.
In the post, user @Guns-and-Pumpkins writes, “Each image generation uses roughly 0.010 kWh of electricity. Running a prompt 100 times burns through about 1 kWh – that’s enough to power a fridge for a full day or brew 20 cups of coffee. Multiply that by the hundreds or thousands of people doing it just to “make a point,” and we’re looking at a staggering amount of wasted energy for a conclusion we already understand.
“So here’s a simple ask: maybe it’s time to let this trend go.”
I have a feeling this won’t be the last time ChatGPT image trends go viral, so we might have to come to terms with the impact of using AI servers for pointless tasks. After all, everything we do on the internet uses energy to some degree, so where should we draw the line?
