Scroll through Instagram this week and you'll hit at least three people who suddenly look like they walked off a Test match field in 1984. Faded colours, plain stadium backdrops, a wooden bat, that soft grain old film cameras used to leave behind. None of it is real. It's ChatGPT.

The trend works off a simple text prompt fed alongside a clear portrait or full-body photo. Ask for a "realistic 1980s Indian cricket photograph," specify traditional whites, a wooden bat, an old cricket ground and faded, slightly imperfect colours, and the tool spits out something that looks pulled from a newspaper archive rather than generated in seconds on a phone.

There's a small craft to getting it right, per the how-to guides now doing the rounds. Vague prompts like "make this an 80s cricket photo" tend to produce something too polished, too digital. The trick is layering in detail, mentioning film grain, natural daylight, an old printed-photo texture, and explicitly ruling out modern gear and logos. Users are told to keep tweaking, asking the AI to preserve their actual face and hairstyle if the first attempt turns them into a stranger, and to expect a couple of tries before the result feels right.

Everyone's doing it, not everyone's thrilled

What started as a cricket-nostalgia gimmick has, predictably, gone wider. Timelines that have nothing to do with sport are full of these portraits now, and the backlash has shown up right alongside the trend itself. There's a familiar grumble doing the rounds in comment sections: another AI filter, another round of everyone posting the identical format within days of each other, PR teams and influencers alike jumping on it whether it suits them or not.

It's the same fatigue that's greeted every AI photo trend since the Studio Ghibli wave, and it never quite kills the trend, it just runs alongside it. For every post complaining that Indian social media has turned into a loop of recycled prompts, there are five more accounts posting their own cricketer avatar an hour later.

Part of the appeal is genuinely how low the bar is. No Photoshop, no editing background, just a decent photo and a prompt copied off a guide. That accessibility is exactly what makes it spread this fast across a country where cricket nostalgia barely needs an excuse to trend.

Whether this fades by the weekend or turns into the next recurring format, the kind Instagram drags out every few months with a new decade or a new sport attached, is the open question. Given how quickly the last few AI trends cycled through and got replaced, this one's shelf life probably isn't much longer than the last.