As China’s obsession with NPC characters swells, a new AI-generated trend is flooding social media across the mainland and the West. Cue, the PS2 filter.
Move over NPC livestreamers, there’s a new AI-generated trend in town: the PS2 filter.
Designed to replicate the glitchy video game personas from the early 2000s, consumers in the West have gone crazy for recreating themselves as retro characters inspired by their favorite PlayStation 2 (PS2) games, such as Grand Theft Auto and Tony Hawk’s Underground. Now, China’s netizens are jumping on board.
The trend, which first surfaced in a Midjourney Reddit forum in November last year, was popularized last month by user @hurtabdu1, after he shared a viral clip of himself as a PS2 character that garnered over one million views in 48 hours.
Deploying the AI program Replicate (a tool that uses machine-learning solution Stable Diffusion), users have been transforming both themselves and popular album covers into the PS2-inspired graphics.
On Xiaohongshu, there are currently over 3.5 million posts dedicated to users reimagining themselves as PS2 characters. Continue to read the full article here
