For women, the viral AI-polaroid trend ‘is that deep’

If you have been online in the past few days, chances are an AI-generated polaroid picture has popped up on your feed. A young woman sits beside her childhood self in a faded, film-style picture. A man wraps his arms around Ariana Grande in a photo booth. A wife poses next to her husband she lost last year. The appeal is obvious: these images reimagine memory, but they are also meant to be fun, an easy way to see yourself in moments that never happened.

“It felt strange but also sweet,” said Anum, 23, who generated an image with her late father. “For a moment it was like he was back.” Her words capture why so many are drawn to the trend, the chance to soften grief through something that looks real enough to believe.

Edits like these are not new. Fans have been making them for years, cropping their faces into selfies with boy bands or film stars. Even during this trend, people have made polaroids with their favorite male celebrities. Those pictures are shared as playful fantasies, and because they were rarely hyperrealistic, everyone understood they were not real.

When the same is done to women, the context shifts. A woman’s face, public figure or not, placed beside a stranger or in a suggestive pose does not read as playful, it is judged as fact. “When it’s a man, people laugh,” said Amnah Farooqi, a Karachi-based psychologist. “When it’s a woman, the image is taken seriously. It has the potential to become evidence, something people use to judge her. The consequences are harsher because they tie into old ideas of honour and shame.”

“That difference is sharper in South Asia,” Farooqi said. “A photo can spread through WhatsApp groups before the person in it even knows it exists. Many people here don’t fully understand how far AI manipulation can go. A manipulated picture can move faster than gossip, and unlike gossip, it feels irrefutable. No explanation can undo it.”

There’s also the question of where these images go once they are made. “Your face doesn’t just stay on Instagram,” said Mohammad Salik, a Karachi-based software engineer. “It becomes part of datasets that feed AI models, ones owned by companies you’ll never see.”

A recent review in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence warned that biometric data, particularly facial images, poses serious risks when stored in large datasets, making people vulnerable to identity theft and unauthorized surveillance. “What looks like a harmless upload can, over time, become part of systems designed to track, categorize, or manipulate without the subject’s knowledge,” said Mohammad.

Some have already stepped back. “I stopped posting selfies,” said Sana, 20. “It feels like my face doesn’t belong to me anymore once it’s online and .” Similar fears have echoed on X and Facebook, where women spoke about losing control of their own faces.

The trend may have started as unserious, but it has shown how fragile consent remains. What looks harmless on a screen can carry real consequences offline. And for now, the questions it raises have no simple answers.