People Are Expanding Their Photos Using AI and Posting the Results to TikTok in a New Trend

The Gist:

• The latest trend on TikTok has people expanding their photos using AI.
• There are several methods that people are using to reveal more behind their old pictures.
• Reactions range from shocking to creepy.

The use of artificial intelligence has been a point of contention all throughout 2023. While some use it purely for entertainment purposes to create funny memes and amusing content, major Hollywood studios and media outlets have also tried to use AI to replace real-life artists as a source of quick and cheap work.

For all intents and purposes, AI can be a useful tool as long as it's not being used at the expense of the livelihoods of creative professionals.

AI serves much better as a means to create fun memes and content on platforms like TikTok. To that end, TikTokers have hopped onto a new trend in which they're using AI to expand some of their photos. While your results may vary, everyone wants to know how to do it with their own pictures. Here's what you should know.

Have you ever looked at one of your old photos and wondered what else was going on in the background? Perhaps you even regret not getting a fuller image of something and you want to tease out more out of the edges of the photo. Well, this new AI expanding trend lets you do just that. Well, in theory anyway.

Folks are posting before and after results of increasing the range of their photos using artificial intelligence.

If you want to try it for yourself, it's pretty easy. In some of these TikToks, you may have noticed that they have "CapCut | Try AI Expand template" in their description. That's exactly what you'll need.

Download the CapCut app from your preferred app store. Search for templates in the app and find the "AI Expand template".

Once there, you can upload up to six photos at once and the app will expand your photos. You can then share directly to TikTok and build your post from there.

Now be warned. These are not actual expansions of your photos. As per the nature of artificial intelligence, it is simply generating a wider frame of your original photo using a resource of pre-existing images. As such, the expansion may even add random objects to the background who were likely not in the picture to begin with.

In fact, folks on TikTok have been pretty disturbed by the results. The expand AI feature has essentially placed the subject of a given photo in random locations and has even generated random people in the background.

After all, AI is simply guesstimating the outer edges of your image based on shallow interpretations of context clues. It doesn't actually know what else might have been in your photo.

If you're looking to try it out for yourself, just be prepared for some uninvited guests in your expanded images.