The “BeFake” App Is the Opposite of BeReal
Last year, I told you all about BeReal , the then-fashion app that encourages you to share real-time, unfiltered photos of everything you do to counteract the curated, contrived nature of Instagram. However, the cultural pendulum never stops swinging, so it’s over . Now there’s BeFake , which spits in the face of BeReal’s seriousness and makes Instagram feel completely organic.
What is Befaik?
When it comes to digital trends, I like to think that I was firmly in the warm embrace of the zeitgeist, so I was dismayed to learn about an application that I had not yet downloaded. When I found BeFake AI on the Apple app store (here is the link to Google Play ), I read its description: “Why be real when BeFake is fun? To be honest, we don’t always show our creative best, and not every moment seems ready to share. So raise your reality with AI.” I created a username and gave it permission to access my contacts (because my data privacy is far gone at the moment, I just don’t care) so I can add a few friends. Surprisingly, none of my contacts have been there yet. I am , in fact, at the forefront.
The app works just like BeReal: every day at a random time, it will tell you when it’s time to take a picture and activate both the front and rear cameras at the same time. However, unlike BeReal, you don’t record what you’re actually doing; you come up with something – whatever you want – and use the built-in AI generator to put yourself in that scenario. The idea here is to be as crazy or as creative as you want. Once a day, you can imagine something wild and then ask the AI to put you in the middle of it.
The app offers out-of-the-box AI hints – like “Logan Paul in the Rainforest” – but it also lets you enter your own, which is where the real attraction lies. I took a picture of myself on the couch with the front camera and let the back camera capture my wall. Then I asked for it to look like I was at a birthday party on a rocket ship. You have 20 minutes from the time the timer goes off to create your scene and post it in time to avoid being penalized, but during those 20 minutes you can review your creation over and over again. “Taking a nap in a cheeseburger” spawned a kind of AI nightmare where you feel like you’re hallucinating because everything you see doesn’t make any sense, but “taking a bath in a giant cup of coffee” worked well enough. Two things happened that I didn’t ask for: the fake artist gave me brown hair for some reason, but also added a cute cartoon man to the front camera image, hinting at the weirdness of my coffee bath.
Like BeReal, you have a channel for your friends and a channel for global discoveries, so the potential for accumulating subscribers for being super creative and posting publicly on this discovery channel is definitely there. The main advantage is also the anonymity associated with the publication of altered images. If you don’t want to be yourself, you don’t have to be yourself.
BeFake has a real catch
There’s one catch with BeFake that BeReal doesn’t: accessing certain features costs money. When I was ready to upload a generated image of myself having fun on a rocket ship, I was prompted to hide the original image. Since it was my ugly photo with a ponytail covered in fresh self-tanner, I hurriedly hit the button and got rejected as I’m not a subscriber. Clicking the “Follow” button unlocked additional features that come with a fee, such as unlimited AI generations, late posts without penalty, and the ability to see friends’ old posts, not just what they’re posting on a given day.
It costs $2.99 per week or $9.99 per month. Year ahead reduced to $99.99. You can also buy credits separately to use them to create images without other perks, at $500 for $9.99. The app gave me 150 credits up front when I joined, but I wasn’t sure what they were for. After six generations of images, I checked my balance and I still have 150, but the platform doesn’t make it clear what actually reduces them or why you have to pay to get more. Even after I published my seventh generation of images (“fighting a bear in an office building,” which—in a creative, albeit sexist—movement—turned me into a man), the amount of the loan didn’t decrease. So, do you need loans? Unclear!
I didn’t buy any credits but I will leave the app on my phone for a while to see if any of my friends join. It would be much more fun if they did. If the app develops in the same way as BeReal, I can imagine that it will be quite interesting, whether I spend money on it or not.