Faking wealth has always been huge business, from buying designer knock-offs to renting private jet “sets” for photo shoots. But today, people are using artificial intelligence to make life more personal: they create photos of themselves living in leisure and luxury, not to chase an advantage, but as a form of personal escapism or an attempt to manifest a better life.
App creator Tim Wijaya sent that earlier this year he was working as a consultant for OpenAI to study how Indonesians operate ChatGPT and found multiple Facebook groups, some with up to 30,000 members, where he shared AI-generated photos of himself engaging in luxury experiences – from posing with Lamborghini to shopping at Gucci stores. “Most of them are middle- and low-income users from tier 2/3 cities earning less than $400 per month,” Wijaya wrote. “It’s both sad and fascinating that the use of artificial intelligence has become a form of escapism, allowing people to experience lives they may never experience.”
Laurent Del Rey, a product designer at the Meta Superintelligence lab, recently created a side project called Endless Summer, a social app “for when you get burnt out and need to manifest a soft life [you] you deserve it – with fake vacation photos” – Del Rey he wrote on X
A slew of other AI manifesting apps have appeared on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, including “Manifest AI Coach: Dreams Made,” which promises to operate AI to create a “vision background” that will facilitate you visualize and manifest your goal; to the similar-sounding AI Manifestar; to ManifestMe, which allows people to “generate personalized visualizations that match your goals and manifestation energy.” Then there was “Manifest AI: Bye Broke Brain,” which promised to “renew your brain in seconds,” and “Manifest AI: Affirmations,” for everyday operate of AI-generating affirmations.
It is worth noting that most of these applications do not exactly match the descriptions. I downloaded “Manifest AI Coach: Dreams Made” – which, of course, had the tagline “Always Be Manifesting” – as well as ManifestMe and Manifest AI, but all I found were text-based affirmations… plus their own weird images of goddesses, sunbursts, and AI-generated DNA sequences.
Endless Summer, however, does exactly what it promised. The app invited me to take three photos that it used as source material for “fictitious vacation photos.” One was made of me in Tokyo, one was made in what looked like a Recent York wine bar (complete with AI words on the boxes), and the other was me sitting at an outdoor dinner in Rio de Janeiro. They didn’t look much like me, but I looked great – hey, I’ll take it.
Did I feel better watching my virtual self enjoy a good life? Not really. Maybe it was because they had this distinct AI-generated aesthetic that reminded me that they were imitation. Or maybe it’s because I don’t feel deprived of experiences in my life – I happen to live in Recent York, so I can stop by the bodega myself. And after three pictures I ran out of idle speed. It invited me to “Carry On” and “Keep the Summer Going” by paying $3.99 for 30 photos, $17.99 for 150 photos, or $34.99 for 300 photos.
At that price, I could pay for my own al fresco dinner (well, maybe not in Recent York). Or a fraction of a Spirit Airlines flight to a really up-to-date place.