How to Take Your Own 90s Yearbook Photo With AI
You’ve seen this trend on TikTok or Instagram: your friends, family, and favorite influencers are sharing 90s yearbook photos. Only these aren’t really photos of them—they’re a collection of images generated by AI.
These Uncanny Valley yearbook photos are taking the internet by storm, and you can try them out for yourself. While there are probably other apps that offer this service, most people seem to use EPIK – AI Photo Editor.
The app didn’t hit the App Store with the express intention of creating yearbook photos using AI: it already offered users AI-powered photo editing tools to remove distracting objects, change the background, add filters, and more. But it was precisely the peculiarity of the yearbook that caused its explosion. Here’s how you can try it for yourself.
How to Create Your Own AI Yearbook Photo
To get started, download EPIK – AI Photo Editor from the iOS App Store or Google Play Store . Open the app, then tap AI Yearbook on the home screen. Click Continue, then select Upload 8-12 Selfies. You’ll need to give the app permission to access your camera roll, but for a safer approach, only give it access to the 8-12 selfies you want to upload.
Once you select your photos, you will need to select your gender and then select your payment method. (Unfortunately, this AI Yearbook feature is not free.) For $5.99, you can return your yearbook photos after 24 hours. For $9.99 you can get them in two hours. Whichever option you choose, select “Create Yearbook Images” to begin the process.
Is the trend of annual AI releases in the 90s safe?
There’s always something unsettling about apps like this, and if you’re wary of sharing your selfies with EPIK, I don’t blame you. However, the app itself seems to handle your data no worse than the average app. For example, it uses IDs to track your activity across other apps and websites, which is what many apps do: if you turn off tracking on your iPhone, this won’t be as much of a problem. It will also store information such as your location if you allow location permission.
But, of course, the big question is the image of your face itself. According to parent company SNOW Corporation, the EPIK app does not store any personal information of its users, including the selfies used to create your AI images. However, this does not mean that SNOW Corporation does not store your information: there is a difference.
In their privacy policy, they discuss how they use facial recognition to perform certain functions within the app, and that while the technology is not used to identify individuals, it does send this data through third parties and store it. They will remove it once its original purpose has been achieved, or within three years.
Based on all this, it looks like EPIK and SNOW don’t store your photos , but it’s possible they will store tracking information, device information, location information, and facial recognition processing. Then again, you probably use apps that use your data in the same way. It’s not very good, but you can probably try it. (Of course, the ethics of these AI image generators is a whole other debate.)