There is a new trend going on where fans can take pictures of themselves and their favorite actors and turn them into a polaroid. They don’t have to have an actual picture of them with this person to work and it makes it look like you have a sweet image with your faves. Don’t do this.
Not to yuck someone’s yum but it is not only strange on a level that even the manips of the early 2000s met, but it is also killing the planet one image at a time. I didn’t realize that the app that it uses is the Google version of AI called “Gemini.” It was really a “drop the Google, it’s cleaner” moment and when I used it one time to see how the trend works, I realized what it was doing.
But I decided to see how the image process works just to see what people are doing online. What I discovered is something incredibly annoying and planet destroying: You have to use the AI app multiple times to get an image that even remotely works. Which begs the question: How many times are people throwing their faces in with their favorite celebrities to make these look good?
Why would you want this?
Most of my adult life has been spent wondering why people do things. As someone who has been in fandom spaces for the last 20 years, I’ve seen fans do strange things. Some will tag celebrities in fanfiction they’ve written about them as people (not their fictional characters), some will do inappropriate photos…the list is endless.
But what I don’t really get about the polaroid trend is that people think it is adorable to post pictures of themselves with celebrities they’ve never met. Frankly, I always thought the “manip” culture of the mid 2000s was more about fictional characters and less about real people so the polaroid of it all feels weird anyway. Even if I don’t get it, I’m not here to say what someone finds joy in is wrong.
With that said, the amount of times one has to feed Gemini an image and a prompt to get what they want, they’re both actively training AI while also killing the planet. Is that really that worth it for a fake image of a celebrity you never met hugging you?
(featured image: CBS)
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