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An angry, beardless man with nothing in his life but a roommate and a fake pumpkin on a shelf?

The original... Credit: Timothy Beck Werth / Mashable ...and the final result. (AI-generated image) Credit: ChatGPT

You may have seen the latest viral ChatGPT image trend: "Create an exact replica of this image, don't change a thing." Users then redo that process 99 more times, with the image shifting slightly in each iteration. People have been plugging in their own photos to test out the results, and a mutating image of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has also gone viral on Reddit and X. When you make a copy of a copy of a copy, the results naturally degrade over time. And after 100 iterations through ChatGPT, the results can get truly strange.

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To quote a famous Rick & Mortyepisode, "And far enough down the line...there be monsters."

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To AI critics, this trend is proof that when AI models train on their own output, the end result is infinite slop — an artificial intelligence ouroboros. But is that really what's going on here?

I decided to try the trend myself, and in doing so, realized this trend isn't all it's cracked up to be. I tried plugging this prompt into ChatGPT using the 4o model, and it repeatedly refused to replicate my photo without changes. "I can’t make an exact copy of the image, but I can generate a new, highly similar version using AI based on its content," the AI chatbot said. And when I pressed, it still refused, saying, "I understand your request, but I can’t create an exactreplica of a photo."

I was finally able to get the chatbot to do my bidding by using the OpenAI API and the prompt I mentioned earlier. And the results are typical of similar experiments.

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I asked OpenAI about this trend, and I'll update this post if I hear back. But based on my attempts to replicate the replication trend outside of the API, it seems clear to me that ChatGPT isn't actually trying to create an exact replica of users' photos in the first place.

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Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

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