For women, the viral tendency AI-multitas “is so deep”

If you have been online in recent days, chances are a Polaroid image created by AI has appeared in your feed. A young woman sits next to her childhood in a faded, cinematic image. A man wraps his hands around Ariana Grande in a photographic pavilion. A woman sets next to her husband who lost last year.

The appeal is obvious: these images repeat the memory, but they are also intended to be fun, an easy way to see yourself in moments that never happened.

“I felt weird but also sweet,” said Anum, 23, who created a picture with her late father. “For a moment was as if it were back.” Her words record why so many are attracted to the tendency, the opportunity to soften sadness through something that seems real enough to believe.

Processes like these are not new. Their fans have been doing for years, cutting their faces into selfies with boy bands or movie stars. Even during this trend, people have made polaroids with their favorite male celebrities.

These images are shared as playful fantasies, and because they were rarely over-ruled, everyone realized that they were not real.

When the same is done with women, the frame shifts. The face of a woman, the public figure or not, is placed next to a stranger or an underlying attitude does not read as a playful, is judged as a fact.

“When he is a man, people are laughing,” said Amnah Farooqi, a Karachi -based psychologist. “When she is a woman, the picture has been taken seriously. It is possible to proof, something people use to judge.

“This difference is more intense in South Asia,” Farooqi said. “A photo can spread through Whatsapp teams before the person knows that there is. Many people here do not fully understand how far ai manipulation can go. A picture manipulation can move faster than gossip and unlike gossip.

There is also the question of where these images go as soon as they are made. “Your face is not just left on Instagram,” said Mohammad Salik, a Karachi -based software engineer. “It becomes part of the data sets that feed AI models, those that belong to companies you will never see.”

A recent review at the border of artificial intelligence warned that biometric data, especially facial images, create serious risks when stored in large data sets, making people vulnerable to identity theft and unauthorized monitoring. “What looks like a harmless upload can, over time, become part of the systems designed to monitor, categorize or handle without the subject’s knowledge,” Mohammad said.

Some have already returned. “I stopped posting selfish,” Sana said, 20. “I feel my face no longer belongs to me when it is online.” Similar fears have been drawn to X and Facebook, where women talked about the loss of control of their own faces.

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