Faking wealth has always been big business, from buying designer dupes to renting private jet “sets” for photoshoots. But these days, people are using AI to make it a little more personal: creating photos of themselves living in leisure and luxury not to chase clout, but as a form of personal escapism or an attempt to manifest a better life.
App developer Tim Wijaya posted that he did consulting work for OpenAI earlier this year to study how Indonesians use ChatGPT and found many Facebook groups, some with up to 30,000 members, for sharing AI-generated photos of themselves having luxury experiences — from posing with Lamborghinis to shopping at Gucci stores. “Most are middle-low income users Tier-2/3 cities making under $400/month,” Wijaya wrote. “It’s both sad and fascinating that using AI has become a form of escapism, letting people experience lives they’ll probably never live.”
Laurent Del Rey, a product designer at Meta’s Superintelligence lab, recently made a side project called Endless Summer, a social media app “for when burnout hits and you need to manifest the soft life [you] deserve – with fake vacation pics of you,” Del Rey wrote on X.
And a slew of other AI manifestation apps have popped up on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, from “Manifest AI Coach: Dreams Made,” which promises to use AI to create “vision backgrounds” to help with visualization and manifestation of a goal; to the similarly pitched Manifestar AI; to ManifestMe, which allows people to “generate personalized visuals that align with your manifestation goals and energy.” Then there was “Manifest AI: Bye Broke Brain,” which promised to “renew your brain in seconds,” and “Manifest AI: Affirmations,” for AI-generating affirmations to use every day.
Most of these apps, it’s worth noting, don’t exactly deliver on their descriptions. I downloaded “Manifest AI Coach: Dreams Made” — which of course had the tagline “Always Be Manifesting” — plus ManifestMe and Manifest AI, but all I found was text-based affirmations… plus their own strange AI-generated images of goddesses, sunbursts, and DNA sequences.
Endless Summer, though, does exactly what it promised. The app invited me to take three photos of myself, which it would use as the source material for “fictional vacation photos.” It generated one of me in Tokyo, one of me in what looked like a New York bodega (complete with AI slop writing on the boxes), and one of me sitting at an outdoor dinner in Rio de Janeiro. They didn’t look too much like me, but I looked great — hey, I’ll take it.
Did I feel better watching my virtual self enjoy the good life? Not really. Maybe that’s because they had that distinct AI-generated aesthetic reminding me they were fake. Or maybe it’s because I don’t feel deprived of experiences in my own life — if nothing else, I happen to live in New York City, so I can pop down to a bodega myself. And after three images, I ran out of free turns. It invited me to “Keep going” and “Let the summer continue” by paying $3.99 for 30 images, $17.99 for 150 images, or $34.99 for 300 images.
At that rate, I could pay for my own outdoor dinner (well, maybe not in New York). Or a fraction of a Spirit Airlines flight to somewhere genuinely new.
