AI '80s Photo Trend Turns Political as BJP and Congress Trade Posts

A viral social media trend that uses ChatGPT to give photographs a 1980s film-camera look has spilled into political territory, with the Congress and the BJP trading AI-generated posts.

The trend, which adds colourful clothing, film grain, faded backgrounds and a film-camera date stamp to images, was initially embraced by several political figures. Union ministers Kiren Rijiju and Piyush Goyal were among the early adopters. Rijiju remarked on X that everyone seemed to be going back to the 1980s, saying he too was drawn into the nostalgia, while Goyal posted that he was vibing to the trend.

The tone changed when the Congress unit in Kerala shared an AI-generated image of a bald man seated in the front passenger seat of a Maruti Suzuki Omni, captioned as a Gujarat street in the 1980s. A poster visible on a wall in the image carried Hindi text reading, "Please smile, you are in Delhi." Commenters flagged what they saw as an evident subtext aimed at the party's rivals from Gujarat. The post also played on the Omni's long association in Bollywood with villains and abductions, a link that has earned the van a meme nickname.

The BJP's Telangana unit responded with its own AI-generated image, showing a woman in a red dress dancing on a table in a bar, with glass cabinets of liquor bottles behind her and four men and a woman watching. Reposting the Congress's van image alongside its own, the BJP captioned the picture as "Lusiana, Italy. Circa-1970s." No individual was named, but the reference pointed to the Italian town where Sonia Gandhi was born.

Both posts were created using AI image tools, underscoring how quickly a light-hearted online trend has been repurposed for political messaging.