An absurd TikTok trend lets AI finish your photo

A new trend on TikTok uses a CapCut template and AI to animate your photo — and it's so absurd.

The trend morphs a regular photo into something out of your most illogical dream, turning a moment from your real life into something that quickly falls off the deep end. In one photo, a man is sitting with his dog in his lap. AI turns that dog into a human wearing a dog suit (for some reason?) and a cop arrests him as the man screams on with three (?) arms.

"To early to be laughin wakin the whole house up🤣🤣🤣🤣," one user commented under the video.

"Well that’s my nightmare sorted tonight," another user said.

In another photo, a woman lays fully clothed in an empty bath tub. When the photo comes to life using AI, water immediately fills the tub, she stands up and miraculously walks through a porcelain-enameled tub, and flings herself back into the tub when she notices a robber is coming through the bathroom door.

The edits are often nonsensical. Still, a few patterns have emerged. These videos usually end up having someone kick the air and someone else with a few too many hands. There's often a cop or a robber somehow involved.

To try the trend for yourself, you have to download CapCut, TikTok's editing app, and use the trend's template. As with most CapCut trends, there are multiple templates, each of which are linked on the specific TikTok videos themselves. One specifically asks the question "who will be taken by the police?" while others simply promise that "AI will guess what will happen next." With most versions of the template, CapCut will have you pick a photo — I chose a photo of my cat at the dinner table — and then will automatically apply the AI effects. In the AI version of the video, my cat put on a purple blazer and white dress shirt, had him do a kick in the air, turned him into an old Asian person, and then rained vegetables down across the screen.

People trying the trend say it shows how ridiculous AI is; always adding a hand, walking through solid objects, or depicting the true chaos of dreams. In one video, where a dog is turned into a truly horrifying human, a commenter shared, "You know what, it’s my own fault for having the internet."

Beyond the relative silliness of the trend, very few users are questioning the ethics of participating in it at all.

Using AI has lasting effects on the environment. A group of more than 130 civil society organizations including Amnesty International and Defend Democracy published an open letter asking the AI industry and its regulators to mitigate the environmental impacts of this tech, TechCrunch reported in February. While we don't know exactly how much energy it takes to try out this specific TikTok trend, an investigation from MIT Technology Review found that a newer AI model uses "about 3.4 million joules, more than 700 times the energy required to generate a high-quality image" to create a five-second video.