Picture Imperfect

AI photo generation is largely used for entertainment, but it also raises concerns about safety and privacy

- By SAMIDHA JAIN

Prompt: “Create a 4K HD portrait in a polaroid-style photo of me hugging Tom Cruise. Add soft lighting and a handwritten caption that says: ‘Forever Yours’. Make Tom wear a kurta pyjama and make me wear a retro Bollywood-style saree.”

This was a prompt that Sanya, an art director of a Mumbai-based ad agency gave Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, which allows users to transform their photos into stylised artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images—from 3D figurines to retro Bollywood portraits. The result, says Sanya, was “better than expected”, based on the likes and comments the photo got when she posted it on Instagram.

For the past month, social media has been flooded with images of girls in beautiful sarees, with perfect makeup and hair, or 3D figurines of people—alone or with friends or partners—or polaroid images of people hugging or kissing their favourite celebrities (from Shah Rukh Khan to Virat Kohli). The images look so real that the improbability of such a thing ever happening goes out of the window.

The internet’s favourites have been Instagram posts where girls have posted Gemini-generated photos with the character Conrad Fisher from the series The Summer I turned Pretty, with captions like: ‘Because Connie deserves better, and that’s me', alluding to the debate surrounding the show's protagonist choosing between two brothers.