The AI Saree: Fun, Fashion, Or A Privacy Trap?

India-West News Desk

NEW DELHI – A new social media obsession is sweeping timelines: turning selfies into vintage Bollywood posters with the help of Google Gemini’s Nano Banana tool. The AI-powered edits, often styled with flowing sarees, retro backdrops, and golden lighting, recreate the look of 1990s cinema and have become the latest viral experiment in nostalgia-driven image transformations.

Users are posting portraits that appear lifted from a film poster, complete with dramatic grain, translucent sarees, and cinematic flair.

The trend, nicknamed the Nano Banana saree edit, has spread quickly, echoing past crazes such as action-figure and anime-style portraits. It requires only a selfie and a carefully written prompt, often crafted with the help of AI text generators, to produce a stylized rendering that merges cultural memory with personal identity.

For many, it is a playful way to reimagine themselves within the aesthetic of classic Bollywood.

But the speed at which the trend has exploded has also sparked urgent warnings. Cybersecurity experts and law enforcement have cautioned that the demand for uploading selfies to unfamiliar platforms is creating new risks for personal privacy. In some cases, fake websites mimicking the Gemini app have appeared, luring users into sharing personal details or bank information. Officials have stressed that once data is uploaded to such sites, recovering it may be nearly impossible.

Concerns have also surfaced about how deeply AI tools are mining personal data. A viral post describing an unexpectedly accurate body detail in a generated image left viewers unsettled, with some speculating that the AI was drawing from stored photo archives beyond the single uploaded selfie.

A familiar caution: online fads fade quickly, while the risks of oversharing personal data can linger far longer.