Over the past few days, celebrities and influencers have gone down memory lane, thanks to their yearbook photos making rounds across social media — but not their original ones.
Instead, they’re AI-derived images created through an app called Epik.
According to NBC News, the app added a new “yearbook” feature that allows users to create nostalgic high school images of themselves. When a user uploads eight to 12 selfies, Epik will dispense 60 AI-generated images of the person in different clothes, hairstyles and poses.
The app is free to download but comes with a fee of $5.99 to $9.99 for users to retrieve the photos for personal use via a standard (up to 24 hours) or express (available in two hours) delivery, but on Oct. 4, the prices were lowered to $3.99 and $5.99, respectively. Due to the new “yearbook” feature’s soaring popularity, many users have been told to “try using the app later.”
Keke Palmer even joined in on the fun and posted her AI images to Instagram. Amused by the results, Palmer shared two versions of her ’90s high school pictures with her more than 13 million followers.
“Idk y’all.. I feel like mine ain’t me fr 🤣🤣 #AIYearbook,” she captioned the post.
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Many of her fans couldn’t get over how lifelike the shots appeared.
“I was about to say, the girl aging backwards lord 😂😂😂,” one person commented under Palmer’s Instagram post.
“Some of these don’t even look like AI 🧐,” someone else wrote.
Shortly after, Palmer returned to Instagram, but this time, she shared some AI-generated images of herself as a male with a hilarious caption that read, “Why the man me look more correct 😍🤣— I’m hollering omg haha yassssss.”
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One fan who was skeptical of the app jokingly warned Palmer to “read the terms and conditions.” Due to the privacy concerns of some users, a media relations person for SNOW Corporation, Epik’s parent company, wrote in a Sept. 28 email that “the Epik app does not store any personal information, including selfies, that is used to create AI yearbook results. … This information is also provided to users of the EPIK app in the app’s privacy policy,” per NBC News.
What do you think of the new feature? Will you be using it in the near future?
