People on TikTok get excited about an AR filter that makes you look like a teenager. Juxtaposed side by side, the filter shows you as you really are, and then a version of you that has perfectly smooth skin and a strange youthful innocence.
The filter has triggered a surprisingly wide range of emotions.
“Haven’t seen her in a long time,” wrote one TikToker in a post. mail with more than 500,000 visits. “Yes… I cried.” In a video with 1 million views, another the user wrote“This filter gave me the ability to finally talk to my younger self,” reflecting on how much she had grown since leaving an abusive living situation.
At the same time, others have filmed TikToks. mock dramatic reactions to see a “younger me” while some people joked on how being a teenager doesn’t mean you have flawless skin, it probably means you can’t keep your acne under control.
We know that social networks can make us feel bad about our appearance. Only in this case, instead of comparing ourselves to others, this filter prompts us to compare ourselves to who we were in the past. Still, it’s a distorted sense of reality: You probably didn’t look like a cherub baby as a teenager, and you may have wrinkles now… but you’re probably a lot more balanced with a lot less chemistry homework.
But for many users, it’s not baby-soft skin that excites them. Rather, the filter stimulates a sense of pain over regrets they have for not enjoying life when they were younger, or over difficult decisions they had to make as adults. Many of these videos are set to the song “freshmen” by The Verve Pipe (which is surprisingly not the same band that wrote “Bittersweet Symphony”). The haunting ’90s alt-rock song has a chorus fit for the emotions that are bubbling up for Gen Xers: “For the life of me, I can’t remember / What made us think we were wise and would never compromise.” .
Sentimental though these TikToks are, it’s far from the first time an AR filter or app has gone viral to show us what we looked like in our youth or how we would look when we’re old.
Just a few months ago, cool AI-generated avatars were all the rage, though that trend has waned considerably. And every once in a while, a filter that makes you look like an animated Disney character will predictably go viral on Snapchat or TikTok, keeping our brain worms entertained for a while until we get bored again.
These AR filters are more likely to go viral, though, since there’s a smaller barrier to entry: You don’t have to download a new app, which is reassuring given the murky history of many viral photo editing apps. SSome photo apps have been found to be vectors for malwarewhile IIn other cases, users have been concerned about what happens to the photos they upload to these apps. These concerns arose around the Russia-based AI publisher faceappwhich he later had to clarify in a declaration that it might store updated photos in the cloud for “performance and traffic reasons,” but that most images are deleted within 48 hours.
Some users may have security concerns about TikTok regardless, but TikTok claims that it does not collect or store our biometric data when we use these AR filters.
In any case, as you idly scroll through TikTok, just remember: We’re all going to die one day!
