The 2016 social media trend is a goldmine for AI data training

Many Instagram users have taken a walk down memory lane by sharing their decade-old photos as part of the 2016 again trend. Experts say these images are extremely useful for training artificial intelligence (AI) models.

It may be hard to believe that 2016 was ten years ago. Justin Bieber's “Love Yourself” was dominating the charts, the world was obsessed with Pokémon Go, and Donald Trump was elected for his first term.

A recent social media trend is capitalizing on 2016 nostalgia, with users sharing photos of themselves in skinny jeans and pink-dyed hair, along with sweet or dramatic stories of the old days.

While some users are genuinely entertained by time capsules popping up in their feeds, others have called the trend a psyop, suggesting that people who share these photos are handing over “over a decade of facial aging data” to algorithms.

In the age of AI, this isn’t the first social media trend to spark similar concerns. Experts warned against participating in the “Hug My Younger Self” trend, as childhood photos are precious biometric data, which can be used to create realistic deepfakes.

The 2016 trend may simply be a testament to what is considered easier times, yet it is important to understand how big technology companies can use the data it generates.

“A data goldmine” for AI companies

Jonathan Drake Steele, a founder of cybersecurity consulting firm Steele Fortress LLC, calls the 2016 trend a goldmine because it solves AI's biggest challenge: temporal data.

Training accurate age-progression or facial recognition models requires images of the same person across time, which is normally expensive to obtain.

Meanwhile, each photo uploaded provides data points such as facial geometry, lighting conditions, backgrounds, and metadata.

“Users are voluntarily providing matched pairs spanning 8-10 years, complete with identity confirmation, which is their own profiles. This data helps models understand how faces change, improving everything from law enforcement tools to deepfake generation,” he says.

Deepfakes have become a highly controversial issue, as they are increasingly used for nefarious purposes like scams, revenge pornography, or public humiliation.

The Senate has recently passed the DEFIANCE Act, which, if signed into law, would allow victims of unconsented sexualized deepfakes to pursue civil action.

Users are voluntarily providing matched pairs spanning 8-10 years, complete with identity confirmation, which is their own profiles. This data helps models understand how faces change, improving everything from law enforcement tools to deepfake generation.

Jonathan Drake Steele

However, there is nothing much that can be done to prevent deepfakes from being created, as proven by the Grok nudes controversy, when X social network was filled with images of digitally undressed women and children.

Aatif Belal, an applied AI manager at Deloitte, says that photos aren’t inherently more useful for training AI, but they can add diversity to training data by capturing different fashions, environments, and social contexts that aren’t as common in today’s highly curated content.

Moreover, these photos predate the explosion of AI-generated imagery, which coincided with the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022.

Belal told Cybernews, “As synthetic images increasingly pollute the internet, true human-taken photos from earlier periods can act as cleaner reference data for future model training.”

Nostalgia comes amid dark times

Michael Smith, a founder at digital marketing strategy agency Buyergain LLC, says the 2016 social media trend has taken off amid darker times. In comparison, the times a decade ago seem more fun, as there was no COVID-19, no new wars, and no tariffs.

“Great escapism and the period 10 years ago is recent enough for most of us to have lots of photos from that time on some hard drive somewhere,” he says.

Some studies suggest that people become more nostalgic when they go through hard times, such as experiencing loneliness. In experiments, nostalgia has been associated with an increased meaning in life, self-esteem, and optimism.

As 76% of Americans say the future of the nation is a significant source of stress, it comes as no surprise that so many users, including celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Megan Markle, have jumped on the trend.

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