As generative AI races to produce ever more sophisticated images, a new trend has users seeking the opposite: intentionally basic and terrible-looking doodles. The worse, the better.

The resulting images flooding social media look like crude drawings out of Microsoft Paint in the ‘90s. People have cartoonish rectangular teeth, half triangles for noses and chaotic squiggles for hair. Reimagined company logos look like chief marketing officers handed over their jobs to their 3-year-olds.

It all started when a Korean creative director and graphic designer who goes by the name Garden Rush shared on Threads a prompt for basic line drawings, labeling it “the most trivial prompt in the world.”

After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reshared an X post about the prompt in late April, it quickly took off on his company’s ChatGPT conversational chatbot. So much so that OpenAI added the prompt directly into Images 2.0 , a new upgrade to its image generation tool that promises a higher-quality output.

You can forget higher quality here. Those partaking in the viral trend want lower quality. Much lower. ChatGPT competitor Grok Imagine, the AI chatbot launched by Elon Musk, has also added a “Scribbli” template that outputs images in a similar rough-hewn style.

What Is The Exact Prompt?

“Redraw the attached image in the most clumsy, scribbly and utterly pathetic way possible,” the prompt reads. “Use a white background, and make it look like it was drawn in MS Paint with a mouse. It should be vaguely similar but also not really, kind of matching but also off in a confusing, awkward way, with that low-quality pixel-by-pixel feel that really emphasizes how ridiculously bad it is. Actually, you know what, whatever, just draw it however you want.”

OpenAI says it saw the trend gaining traction about a week after Images 2.0 launched on April 21.

The silly images evoke nostalgia and simpler times, with to Adele Li, product management lead for ChatGPT Images, calling the craze “joyful, social and instantly understandable.” It comes at a time when public discussions around AI, and the companies that produce it, tend to be serious, technical and sometimes highly fraught, as demonstrated by the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI , which has gotten increasingly messy and personal.

This isn’t the first ChatGPT image trend to inspire a wave of user-generated content. Earlier this year, a viral trend had people uploading photos of themselves to the OpenAI platform and asking it to produce a workplace caricature based on their chat history. And last year, Studio Ghibli-inspired images flooded social media after OpenAI released a new image generator.

But while that trend often led to rich, polished visuals, the latest one unapologetically embraces lo-fi, simple and sloppy.