OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a Trend Machine: Internet behaviour has evolved in a very annoying way in the last couple of years with prompts and screenshots. These prompts and the by-products have even called for debates on how it devalues human creativity.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a Trend Machine
In times today, one person tries a prompt, and some fifteen minutes later, your entire feed is doing the same thing. At this point, ChatGPT is not just the place we go when we do not know how to write an email or explain trigonometry; it has become something strange: it has become a “trend machine”.
The internet used to need a filter, a dance, a comedy hook, a meme or a catchy audio to transform it into a ChatGPT trend, but now all it needs is a prompt and the latest proof, which is spilling all over Instagram: the “80s trend”.
The Internet Has Officially Travelled Back to the ‘80s
If your Instagram feed has suddenly become full of big hoop earrings, dramatic hairstyles, high-waisted trousers, soft photographs, and people looking straight out of an old family album, you have not accidentally stepped into a time machine instead of your office cab.
You have probably encountered the latest ChatGPT “80s trend”. The premise seems simple: a user uploads a photograph and asks ChatGPT to reimagine them as if the picture was taken in the 1980s. The seemingly fascinating part is that AI does not just layer it with a vintage film filter, but it reconstructs the entire visual imagery of the decade. It changes the clothes, hairstyle, accessories, setting, lighting and grainy texture.
Instagram further fuels it with the “Add Yours” feature, which has helped turn the idea into something contagious, with people passing the prompt and inviting their followers to create their own version of it. A lot of people participating in the trend were not even alive in the period but have posted the picture nevertheless with a “following the trend, it is fun” caption going along.
ChatGPT Made Us Cartoons
Earlier this year, social media had become obsessed with asking ChatGPT to create an image based on what it already knew about the users. One version was based on everything it knew about the users’ job.
The important point here is that people were not simply asking the AI to make them look a certain way but were asking it to “interpret them. The appeal was not really the cartoon but the little details, tiny objects, references, hobbies: all of it became a visual representation of the individual personality itself.
The trend became popular across social media platforms, following the earlier craze of AI-generated Ghibli art. The shift is worth paying attention to because there is a difference between asking AI to make a picture and asking it to interpret everything about someone.
The Ghibli Replication Was an Outburst Moment
The enormous Studio Ghibli-style image wave in 2025 was one of the moments that made AI image generation feel less like a niche technology and more like mainstream social media.
When OpenAI expanded image generation to free users, the internet quickly turned itself into an animated universe. Everyone tried being a Ghibli character in absolutely no time.
For an art form that took legendary Japanese animator and manga artist Hayao Miyazaki years to create and popularise, AI making it in less than a minute was perhaps almost like robbing the artist’s credit. Miyazaki himself was reportedly not in favour of AI.
What Exactly is the ChatGPT Trend?
There is a progression: it was photographs that AI transformed; then the aesthetics; and gradually it started interpreting occupations, personalities and memories. It is now transforming time.
The ‘80s trend is particularly fascinating because it does not ask AI to invent an entirely different person. It asks it to take the person and place them somewhere they could really never have been. It lingers on a kind of digital nostalgia that most people do not even personally remember but works well on Instagram.
Social Media has always been obsessed with identity, and every person with this trend has an identity from a timeline they were never supposed to be.
ChatGPT Does Not Just Follow Internet Culture Anymore
The AI is no longer simply participating in internet culture anymore: it is helping create it. A prompt becomes a format, followed by an Instagram story, then a Reel, and gradually an article, which then can become a prompt and the loop continues.
Nobody really knows what the next trend would be, but even with the depleting water levels, everyone seems sure about another trend anyway. With the release of the official teaser trailer of Artificial, a discussion around OpenAI’s ChatGPT seems even more important.
There is even a human cost attached to this. The problem is not that everyone suddenly wants to see oneself in the ‘80s era, but the uncomfortable part is what happens to the actual artists behind the aesthetics we are casually creating: the cartoonists, illustrators, designers. A visual style is not a mere prompt for them, but years of practice, experiments, failed attempts, and finally achieving a distinct style.
AI might be making the image creation very accessible, but it is also making human creativity feel increasingly replaceable.
Also Read: