Artificial Intelligence has come to break any time limit established until now. Until now, it was common to find all kinds of apps that, with a simple photo, ventured to predict what our appearance would be in a few years. Now, the viral phenomenon driven by EPIK has reached a new dimension. Allowing us to begin a journey in time that takes us to the yearbooks of American high schools in the 90s. We tell you everything about this new phenomenon.
During the last few months, Artificial Intelligence has penetrated all kinds of spheres of our daily lives. From its most professional use, allowing us to use ChatGPT to prepare our job interviews, to its most recreational aspect, as is the case of EPIK – AI Photo Editor. A new tool that has become the latest fashion among influencers and all types of content creators of international stature.
We only have to enter the hashtag #YearBookChallenge on the main social networks to assist an endless list of users who have fallen in love with the different possibilities that the tool offers us. All of them with the same common denominator: an aesthetic that exudes nineties air in abundance with a realism that becomes hypnotic. But how is it used and what are its limits?
AI Yearbook Effect
The first thing we must do to be able to join this trend is to download the application, available for both iOS and Android for free, and then click on IA Yearbook. And the app itself acts as if it were a repository of filters, allowing us to choose between different options to edit and improve our photographs.
Once we click on the IA Yearbook option, the application guides us through the entire process step by step to achieve the best result. Offering us indications not only of the type of selfie that we should upload to achieve optimal results, but also giving us some warnings about the type of content that is not accepted within the application’s policies and that, therefore, we will run the risk of having our account suspended if we try to edit it.
To improve the results, we must upload between 8 and 12 selfies following the guidelines previously mentioned by the application. And then select the genre in which we are interested within the yearbook.
Two rates and a large cast of influencers behind
SNOW Corporation, The company behind EPIK has thought of everything when setting its pricing policies. When we are in the last step and there is only request AI to process the images, The application offers us two payment methods, depending on how quickly we have to process the images. For a price of €3.99, we will have our yearbook within 24 hours. However, if we are in a hurry, we can pay a slightly more expensive rate, €6.99, and we will receive a notification with all the material when barely two hours have passed.
Once this time has passed we will have access to 60 different images, using as raw material between 8 and 12 selfies that we have previously uploaded. The entire pack of images will be decorated not only with the 90s atmosphere itself, but also with a large number of hairstyles, outfits and all kinds of accessories from the time.
As it could not be otherwise, the success of EPIK has been accompanied by a large number of influencers who have started using the application and have been surprised by the realism of photographs generated by AI. Laura Escanes and Paula Gonu, two of the best-known faces in our country, have been just some of the examples that have not been slow to praise the possibilities of the application in Spain.
However, we also found some detractors. As has been the case of Bretmack Rock. He has gone so far as to publicly state that “Miss AI is not capable of understanding my beauty”, even paying twice for the application to try to improve the results obtained in the first subscription.
Privacy, at risk?
As usually happens in these cases, the virality of EPIK has not been without controversy. Once the application has begun to gain the popularity it currently has, many voices have begun to rise and question the cost of giving our images to an Artificial Intelligence that, at the expense of our benefit, will go training and improving their results until it becomes increasingly complex to discern between what is real and what is artificial.
Since the Artificial intelligence began to play a much more prominent role in our daily lives, concern around aspects such as privacy and ethics has not stopped growing, with a greater number of voices warning about this situation. Franchesca Ramsey has been one of the critical personalities. This American activist was quick to expose the problem that AI is generating for a large number of artists, who are seeing how their work begins to disappear. In addition to warning about the dangers that AI training can generate.
While is true that SNOW Corporation, the South Korean parent company that owns the application, has already stated that it does not store any type of information. The reality is that, more or less indirectly, the user finds himself in the situation of having to pay for a service that, in addition, will serve as a learning tool for his AI model to a point at which it can identify, or No, the real images among the results obtained will be especially complex.
