AI Watch: ChatGPT’s caricature trend takes over social media

ChatGPT’s caricatures have in recent days taken over social media feeds, from Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok feeds to WhatsApp statuses. 

Wondering how you could jump into the trend? The caricature feature began to gain massive popularity during the first week of February 2026.

Here, users create exaggerated cartoon versions of themselves, usually based on their professions or hobbies, by providing prompts. 

The majority have been creating caricatures based on their jobs or depicting them surrounded by the things that they love. 

This has seen many people get animated pictures of themselves in an over-exaggerated cartoon-style portrait. 

Using prompts such as “Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me,” ChatGPT users are having fun creating and sharing cartoon-style images. Users are required to share their image with the chatbot, through which a caricature is created. 

In this feature, ChatGPT not only reconstruct your face, but also your habits.

To create your caricature, the chatbot uses your historical information, which provides it with the relevant interests that you depict. 

People who are new to the chatbot would have to use more detailed prompts that give the AI tool more information to create the caricature. 

Privacy concerns 

Well, using AI tools is all fun until expert warnings - which are likely to be disregarded by users – begin flooding these online spaces.

Experts warn that many ChatGPT users are giving personal information to the chatbot, as their images are unique personal identifiers. 

It is perceived that with such trends, Chatbots collect, analyse and store the users’ data and controlling it might be difficult. This might lead to potential identity misuse.

According to ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s policy, personal data is used to improve their services and train their models, often powered by DALL-E 3. 

There is a likelihood of this data being used beyond the user's intentions, to help OpenAI with activities such as product improvement and research.