Asked to regenerate an image over and over, ChatGPT turned a realistic photo into a cartoon
This story was corrected after publication (Oct. 9, 2026). Details
ChatGPT was told to regenerate an image from scratch over and over.
ChatGPT doesn’t copy an image pixel by pixel; it generates it again every time. Small differences pile up with each round, faces, body proportions and colors drift, and the realistic photo ends up as a cartoon. At the end of the experiment, ChatGPT refuses to keep going, citing its content policy. People have been running this experiment since 2025.
Sources
- Know Your Meme, “Replicate This Image 100 Times”, (knowyourmeme.com)
- TechRadar, “ChatGPT viral trend gone wrong - The Rock is turned into abstract art after Reddit user creates a replica 101 times”, (techradar.com)
Corrections and updates
- The version first posted on Instagram, including its headline, said the image was regenerated 200 times. That number could not be verified and the video shows no round counter; it has been removed from the text.
About this story
This story was posted on Instagram by @jarrus.tech on Oct. 6, 2026.
Spotted an error in this story? [email protected] · Instagram
Short link: thejarrus.com/en/chatgpt-copy
This story in Turkish: Bir resmi defalarca yeniden üretmesi istenen ChatGPT, gerçekçi bir fotoğrafı karikatüre çevirdi
On the same topic
Robot tests: even the best model completed only 19% of 84 robot tasks, and 63 tasks were solved by no model
In RobotWorld, a benchmark released October 7, the top model, GPT-6 Astra, completed only 16 of 84 simulated robot tasks; no model solved 63 of the tasks.
OpenAI’s image model posts a near-perfect score on text-dense images
On UltraText Bench, a dense-text test led by Westlake University, OpenAI’s GPT Image 2 ranked first of 24 configurations with 99.35 out of 100.
A flaw in ChatGPT’s Mac app that could expose private chats was found and patched
Patrick Wardle found CVE-2026-100754, a flaw in ChatGPT’s Mac app that could expose chat history; OpenAI fixed it on September 25 in version 26.924.20706.