Caricature trend: Why you shouldn’t make an animation using AI, privacy concerns and energy use

You upload a photo, press generate, and if you’ve used ChatGPT enough, moments later a glossy, cartoon-perfect version of yourself appears on screen, complete with your career, hobbies and personality neatly packaged into a single image.

The viral AI caricature trend has flooded social media feeds in recent weeks, with people clearly keen to see how artificial intelligence views them.

But while the results are often cute or funny, experts say the trend raises bigger questions about privacy, identity and the hidden environmental cost of AI.

Dr Jessamy Perriam, a senior lecturer in the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University, said her immediate reaction to the trend was sceptical.

“Like a lot of AI trends, my instant gut reaction is like, ‘oh, but why?’” she said. “Why are we doing this? What value does it kind of add?”

Although she didn’t initially want to generate a caricature, Dr Perriam created one so she could better understand what was happening.

“It was really interesting from that perspective, having myself reflected back to me by a machine… it just feels totally bizarre.”

Privacy and intellectual property concerns

One of the biggest risks, Dr Perriam said, comes down to what users are giving away when they upload an image.

“How you’re prompting ChatGPT to get this caricature in the first place” matters, she said.

“You need to upload an image, and the privacy concerns are what else is within that image and whether there’s anything you perhaps wouldn’t want the internet or ChatGPT to know about you.”

Background details can carry unintended consequences. Dr Perriam pointed to warnings shared by members of Australia’s First Nations community about intellectual property risks.

“Be really careful with what’s in the background of the image that you upload,” she said. “There might be intellectual property at play here that you might not want to have a machine replicate for profit.”

At a basic level, Dr Perriam said the system is doing more than simply creating a cartoon.

“ChatGPT is grabbing the picture you’ve uploaded, doing a quick (internet) search of you, and then reflecting back through imagery what your job is about, or what your professional life kind of says about you based on keywords it’s found,” she said.

That information is often public, but the risks increase as users add more personal detail.

“The more you disclose, the likelihood is higher of your privacy being at risk,” she said.

“That’s no different to how most people would use the internet on a day-to-day basis.”

The hidden energy cost of AI trends

Beyond privacy, there is another cost most users never see: energy and water consumption.

“It’s tricky to pin down the exact number on energy and water consumption,” Dr Perriam said, noting that companies operating data centres are often not transparent about their environmental impact.

However, existing estimates give a sense of scale.

Using an older version of ChatGPT to write a 100-word email which is usually around two steps, she said, consumes “the equivalent of like a 500ml bottle of water and the equivalent of switching on 14 LED lights for an hour”.

Generating an AI caricature is significantly more complex, therefore using even more than half a litre of water per search.

“With this AI caricature trend, that kind of ramps it up to about five steps,” Dr Perriam said, including analysing the uploaded image, searching the internet for references, identifying keywords and generating multiple visual elements.

“For some folks [there are] a few backwards and forwards prompts and revisions,” she said. “That would become quite costly in terms of energy and water.”

Despite her concerns, Dr Perriam isn’t surprised the trend has taken off.

“It’s a curiosity thing,” she said. “You see how it’s transformed someone and you want to know what that transformation would be like for yourself.”

And the images are often quite flattering, so Dr Perriam understands the appeal.

“It turns someone into an ideal version of themselves,” she said.

But as AI-generated trends continue to come and go, Dr Perriam believes they’re worth slowing down for, even when they seem harmless.

“AI image trends, I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon,” she said.

“Every year there’ll be a trend that kind of catches hold of the imagination of people, and then it dies down until the next thing pops up.”