MOBILE, Ala. (WALA) – Social media timelines are flooding with cartoon-like images cluttered with clocks, trophies, coffee mugs, notepads, and flowers.
The ChatGPT caricature challenge is simple: users type the prompt, “Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me,” add whatever details they want the AI to consider, and hit generate.
From kitchen sets to TV sets, people are having a blast with it. Most people seem to be impressed with how vivid and spot-on the likenesses are, while others can’t help but point out the AI’s quirks—like one married man whose ring mysteriously vanished from his hand.
This trend is part of a broader wave of personalized AI-generated content that’s been sweeping social platforms. Similar challenges have asked AI to imagine users as cartoon characters, Renaissance paintings, or even fantasy heroes. The trends are made possible, thank to the image generation technology built into tools like ChatGPT.
And speaking of ChatGPT—maybe it’s no coincidence that the site went down right in the middle of all this activity.
On Tuesday, ChatGPT was briefly offline for thousands of users across the United States. According to Downdetector, reports spiked around 2:20 p.m. and peaking at over 13,000.
OpenAI confirming the issue on its status page and saying it had applied “the necessary mitigations.”
Whether the outage was actually caused by the flood of caricature requests remains unclear—but it certainly didn’t stop the trend from taking over your feed.
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