Images generated by artificial intelligence can be convincing at first. Here are some things to look for if you're unsure if the image is real or not.
The use of artificial intelligence as a means for creative expression has become more and more commonplace, and that's no exception for the latest trend.
People all over the world have been using OpenAI's ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot designed to hold lifelike conversations and generate content for users, to turn themselves - or anything they have a photograph of - into something else.
Trends involving AI-generated imagery generally start and circulate on social media, where users post the reference photo and the final result side by side. This latest trend appeared to have started on Reddit before migrating to TikTok and later X.
"Make this cat (male/female) as a real person, pose (optional) keep everything else in the image the same," a Reddit user posted in the r/ChatGPT subreddit, an online forum decided to OpenAI's tool on April 7. "Would be interesting to see your results."
Here's what to know about the trend, including a step-by-step guide on how to utilize the software turn your pet into a human (sort of).
How to use OpenAI's ChatGPT to make your pet human: Enter this prompt
Turning your pet, whether cat or dog, into an AI-generated illustration with ChatGPT only takes a few steps, as previously outlined on Reddit by u/AndrewJumpen:
For those who are curious, my final result looks like this:
AI-generated portraits of pets as humans shared on social media
Users have shared AI-generated portraits of their pets, mostly dogs and cats, into adult humans on social media. A select few, though, have even turned the human in the reference photo into a pet.
Those who have participated in the trend have been impressed and even entertained by the results, with many of them enthusiastically posting them to social media.
The wave of AI-generated image trends, from Studio Ghibli to Barbie, gained traction on social media a couple weeks after the company unveiled GPT‑4o, an image generator that accepts a mixture of text, audio, image and video input, according to a Sept. 24 post from IBM.
The rapid expansion and the use of advanced AI systems like ChatGPT for either personal or professional use, however, have also "inspired concern" about the inherent issues that arise, like plagiarism and misinformation, from a technology created to understand and generate human-like context, an April 19 post from IBM reads.
