ChatGPT caricature trend reveals how AI chatbots remember your personal details

I tried the new ChatGPT caricature trend and was shocked how well the AI chatbot knows me

A viral AI art craze turns personal details into playful portraits ChatGPT and AI chatbots can cause a lot of trouble when they exaggerate. Luckily, the latest viral AI image fad actually encourages it, at least when it comes to your hair, teeth, or chin. Following the trend of turning pictures in renaissance paintings and 3D figurines, there's a new vogue for asking AI chatbots to draw a caricature of you, the kind you might get on a beach boardwalk, but specifically about your job. But instead of you skateboarding or surfing or whatever else the artist decided you might like, people are asking AI to produce caricatures based on what the AI knows of them and their jobs and lives. The results might shock you with their accuracy or their wild errors, but they are both entertaining and reveal a lot about how AI models process details about users, and what they hold in their memories. Here's how you can do it too. It's a bit like if the caricature artist at the beach was also a mind reader, one who could see everything you've said about yourself and describe your life and work. It's easy enough to do, assuming your AI chatbot of choice has absorbed enough information about you through conversation. Upload a straightforward, fairly close-up picture of yourself, particularly your head and upper body. Then pair it with a prompt like: "Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me." It nailed my career as a science and tech reporter and added lots of other little details like my love of books and coffee. It even pulled a memory from me describing my desk and office. That's why there's a window onto a yard where two dogs who look very much like my actual dogs are playing. I don't have a "Press" coffee mug, but I'd be lying if I said it was far removed from some of my actual mugs. If you've been a long‑time ChatGPT user, the chatbot will already have a context bank built up from your past conversations. It doesn't remember them in the human sense, but it can link together pieces of your self‑description into a composite vision for a caricature. Also, while "caricature" should be enough, you might want to add more detail about the visual style if it's not quite right. I suggest a phrase like, "a classic, funny caricature with exaggerated facial features and a vibrant, hand-drawn art style." Part of the reason this works is how ChatGPT integrates visuals with text. When you ask it to generate an image, the model doesn't just look at your selfies and apply a style. Instead, it interprets your words and your image together, learning from descriptive cues to build a scene. Models trained on massive image‑text datasets have internalized associations. If your chat history with it is thin, you can supply details about your job, interests, hobbies, pets, or anything else, and the image generator will stitch them together. I've talked with ChatGPT enough that it didn't need anything extra to do a pretty good job. For fun. I then asked ChatGPT to do the same for itself. The self-image of ChatGPT as a caricature suggests the AI has trained on a lot of data, calling the chatbot friendly and helpful (and apparently a Corgi lover). The notebook may be upside down, but the fact that the caricature has also drawn an image of a cartoon that itself is holding a pencil is pretty deep. The results of asking ChatGPT for a caricature of yourself can be evocative. More like little narratives than static images. And they show something about how AI "sees" us, and the caricature version of ourselves we share online.

ChatGPT caricatures are taking over social media -- but at what cost?

Have you seen larger-than-life depictions of your friends lately? They might have been sucked into the latest social trend: creating AI-generated caricatures. The trend itself is simple. Users input a common prompt: "Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me," and upload a photo of themself, and, voila! ChatGPT (or any AI-image platform) spits out an over-the-top, cartoon-style image of you, your job, and anything else it's learned about you. This ability is predicated on a robust ChatGPT (or other AI) chat history. Those who don't have a close, personal relationship with the AI might need to give additional information to get a more accurate depiction. But notably, that's yet another instance of potential AI privacy concerns. It's not the first AI image trend. Other social media challenges have had users posting themselves as AI-generated cartoons, Renaissance paintings, or fantasy characters.