Your face, their server: The real price of ’80s AI-style photo frenzy
The latest AI image trend buzzing across social media feeds is the ’80s AI photo. Thousands of users are casually uploading selfies to turn themselves into retro-style portraits, in a trend reminiscent of ‘Ghiblify,’ which took off in early 2025 after OpenAI rolled out upgraded image-generation features for GPT-4o.
AI chatbots can transform an image within minutes, producing results that are often strikingly realistic. But amid the fascination, few users stop to ask a more important question: where does that image go once it is uploaded? And that, precisely, is the problem.
