If you’ve been active on TikTok or Instagram recently, you may have noticed something peculiar going on. AI photos have been going for the “perfect” thing for years, the perfect skin, perfect lighting, everything airbrushed to death. Now everybody wants to make their AI photos look bad.
I’m not joking. Grainy, blurry, faded, glitchy — like someone dug up an old camcorder tape, or a disposable camera from a house party in 2003. I wish I could explain this to them, I think it’s getting a lot of traction because of the “lo-fi realism” label. Everyone’s a little drained of the superfluous “influencer” aesthetic, and this is a bit of a return to reality. As if it were a real moment and not a fake one.
Let’s dive in and explore how you can use it for yourself, and what you can copy/paste in ChatGPT or Gemini to get started.
Why This Is Working
No one wants to be a mannequin again. Photos will be more ‘lived-in’ if you add scratches, faded colors, grain, and a little bit of blur, like it really did happen. It’s particularly large amongst the younger audience who have spent their childhoods in a sea of well-designed feeds and now crave for something different.
Consider camcorder overlays, stamps in the corner with dates, the old camcorder tv feel, painful flash photos, anything that your mom’s old photo albums had, but on an AI basis.
6 Prompts Worth Trying
- Disposable Camera Flash — very bright direct flash, overexposed face, grainy, warm yellow, and faint date stamp on top of it, like an old film print.
- Camcorder Freeze-Frame — like a paused VHS tape, this feature overlays a timestamp on the freeze-framed image, adds scan lines, softens blurriness and over-saturates colors.
- Myspace-Era Party Photo — strong flash, some blown-out highlights, a lot of energy in the background, a bit of motion blur.
- Faded Film Print — soft contrast, warm orange and muted green color, light leak on the corner, fine grain.
- CRT Screen Capture — scan lines, color bleeding of edges, soft glow, corner distortion.
- Accidental Blur Candid — out of focus, motion blur, poor framing, warm indoor lights, light grain.
A Few Tips
You have to have a good baseline photo, otherwise the AI won’t have anything to process. Don’t just use the word “vintage,” state a decade instead, such as the 90s or the early 2000s, as these are better choices when it comes to steering the color grading. If the tool fails to perform all its tasks, don’t force it to do grain + blur + flash + timestamp in one shot.
This week, give it a shot on a picture of your own – it’s a fun way to add a throwback moment to your camera roll, and honestly a bit addictive once you get rolling.
I test every AI prompt before publishing — no guesswork, just results that work. When I’m not prompting Gemini, I’m hunting for the next AI trend worth sharing.
