- Remini is an AI photo enhancer that claims to show you what your kids will look like.
- It's one of the top apps in the app store, and it's going viral on TikTok.
If you've ever wondered what your future kid is going to look like, you might want to try the AI baby filter that's going viral on TikTok.
The photo-editing and enhancing app is called Remini, and it's currently the second-most popular free app on the Apple App Store. It's been downloaded an estimated 2 million times in the US since it was released in August 2019, per data from the app analytics platform Appfigures.
To use the AI baby filter, people upload photos of themselves or with their partners to generate images of what their children might look like.
Many have taken to TikTok to showcase their results under the #AIbabyfilter hashtag, which has 6.9 million views, and the #Remini hashtag, which has 1.4 billion views. Not all of the videos under the Remini hashtag are of the AI baby filter.
Some parents are finding the AI-generated baby photos bear a striking resemblance to their real kids.
'Wait I kinda see it'
TikTok user Audrey, who posts videos under the username @audreyanne.j, shared a comparison video that featured images of the AI-generated baby as well as her real child.
"Wait I kinda see it," Audrey wrote in the caption of her video, which has been viewed more than 370,000 times since she uploaded it a week ago.
@audreyanne.j wait I kinda see it #babyaitrend #babyfilter ♬ 3:15 (Slowed Down + Reverb) - Russ
"I tried the filter just for fun but I was actually shocked at how accurate the results were," Audrey, who asked to be identified by only her first name to protect her privacy, told Insider.
"Most of the 'babies' the app came up with had very similar features to my daughter, and some could literally be her siblings," she added. "It's kind of scary."
A TikTok mom named Jassie Sarmiento, who goes by the username @mommyjassie, told Insider she was intrigued by the Remini app.
@mommyjassie Our #AiBaby vs #RealBaby #TooJuan #remini #reminiapp #reminibaby #aigenerator #fyp #foryou what do you think? #capcut #couple #babygenerator ♬ Ready - Official Sound Studio
A video comparing the images generated by the AI baby filter to photos of her son has garnered over 13,000 views since she shared it on TikTok.
"I just wanted to see how accurate it would be," Sarmiento said. "I guess the real child looked better than the AI?"
Another TikTok user, who goes by Miara and uploads videos under the username @kjmnailz, posted a 15-second clip that included images generated by the AI baby filter as well as photos of her daughter.
"Daddy's genes won," she wrote in the caption of the video, alongside a few emojis.
@kjmnailz Daddy’s genes won
♬ 3:15 (Slowed Down + Reverb) - Russ
"Honestly, I just wanted to see how accurate AI could really be," Miara told Insider. "They definitely did get details right, which is honestly scary, because how can a computer predict or put an image together of a future child?"
AI apps come with potential dangers
Remini is owned by Bending Spoons — a Milan-based software company that also owns the video-editing app Splice and the health app 30 Day Fitness. Apart from the AI baby filter, the Remini app also has a host of other photo-enhancing features.
The app's AI Photo functionality was launched in April 2023, a spokesperson for Bending Spoons told Insider. In the two weeks from July 2 to July 15, the app was downloaded about 40 million times worldwide, he said.
"We believe an important reason why it has been so successful is that it gives users the ability to truly recognize themselves in the AI-generated photos," he added.
Remini uses multiple content moderation filters to "thwart misuse or generation of inappropriate content," the company spokesperson said. He added that all images are encrypted and stored with a US-based provider.
"Users always retain control over their data, and we do not sell, lease, or trade users' images to any third parties," the spokesperson added.
AI filters typically use a deep learning model to generate a synthetic image from given input images, Bo An, the co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, or AI.R, at Singapore's National Technological University told Insider.
"The model is trained to learn the correlations between the facial features of adults and their corresponding baby images. Then, given the input images of adults, the model can predict the appearance of their future children based on the learned correlations," he said.
However, Bo also said people should be careful when sharing photos with AI apps.
"The generated images could be used to create illegal content such as child sex images," Bo said.
AI techniques can turn some of these photos into videos — which can then be used for fraud, he said. Some of these AI-generated videos are so realistic that it can be "hard to identify whether the person in the video is the real one or synthesized by AI," he added.