People are asking AI to recreate the same image over and over again, with each iteration drifting further and further from the original.
The results are sometimes amusing, sometimes unsettling. In some cases, the images completely shape-shift into crazy abstract forms. In others, facial features are wildly exaggerated.
One of the most viral images is of actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson replicated a staggering 101 times.
somebody on Reddit told ChatGPT to replicate an image of The Rock without changing anything 100 times over pic.twitter.com/IcRgmWHCWK
— Kristi Yamaguccimane (@TheWapplehouse) May 3, 2025
While the first few iterations closely resembled the original photo, subsequent versions saw Johnson’s features morph and distort, eventually becoming totally abstract.
ChatGPT prompted to “create the exact replica of this image, don’t change a thing” 74 times pic.twitter.com/u6E8aVThy2
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) May 1, 2025
I tried the “Create the exact replica of this image, don’t change a thing.” trend. pic.twitter.com/xcAcsvBRJp
— Rish Agarwal (@rish404) April 30, 2025
So what’s going on under the hood? It’s primarily a result of how AI models are trained and how they encode and reconstruct images.
When an AI is asked to recreate an image, it doesn’t simply copy and paste the original pixels. Instead, it breaks the image down into a complex set of features and patterns, which it then tries to reassemble based on its understanding of what the image should look like.
However, this process is inherently imperfect and introduces small errors or deviations each time. As the image is repeatedly fed back into the AI, these deviations compound, leading to increasingly distorted or unexpected results.
It’s a bit like playing a visual game of “telephone” or “whispers,” where each message you whisper to the next person introduces new features.
However, AI’s aberrations may also reveal something about the biases and assumptions baked into these models. For example, some images seem to exaggerate facial features or create a warmer, more orange-tinted color palette.
Users also noticed that eyebrows become highly exaggerated – almost painted on in the style of social media filters. As for the orange tint, some speculate that warmer tints are preferred in photography and thus are more common in the training data.
Really, though, we have no idea what’s happening inside the immense “black box” that is today’s largest frontier models.
But in the meantime, social media users seem to be having plenty of fun with the surreal, often disturbing results of repeated recursive AI image generation.
Trends involving AI, like we recently saw with AI action figures, have recently taken off on social media, with thousands of people getting involved across X, Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram.
One quipped, “I drained the ocean replicating my image 100 times.” Not to be a buzzkill, but it’s a good point.