AI trends of 2023: the yearbook, the filters, the spaghetti

AI trends of 2023, month by month

Dated from the earliest post or article we could open for each one. The last column is that trend's own Google search curve, worldwide: weekly from 1 Jan 2023 to 16 Oct 2026, and day by day for Bold Glamour and the AI yearbook. 'Now' is the average of the last four full weeks (13 Sep to 10 Oct 2026), as a share of the trend's peak.

Weekly dates are the Sunday the week starts on. 'Half' and 'a tenth' are the first week (or, for the daily series, the first of three days in a row) below 50% and 10% of the peak. Our weekly series starts on 1 Jan 2023, so it misses the AI Manga filter's December 2022 run, when its videos went viral. We leave out political fakes, hoaxes and anything starring children.

The biggest AI trend of 2023, three ways

By Google searches, the AI yearbook. When we put 2023's trends side by side in Google Trends (weekly, worldwide), its peak week, starting 1 Oct 2023, was about twice the film selfie posters' peak, five times the pet posters', nearly seven times Bold Glamour's and nine times the teenage filter's. It's also the 2023 trend people still look up most: over the 28 days to 16 Oct 2026, 'ai yearbook' drew more than twice the searches of 'will smith spaghetti' or the pet posters, and about 16 times those of 'bold glamour'. These are relative figures from our own pulls, not search counts.

By people taking part, Bold Glamour has the best-sourced claim: NPR put the number who'd tried it in the tens of millions by 9 Mar 2023, six days after its search peak. And for staying power, the spaghetti video wins, for reasons below.

For scale against this year: over those same 28 days, a 2026 remake, Hotel Lobby, drew about five times the searches of the AI yearbook.

The AI yearbook trend: an app, a price and eleven days

The AI yearbook wasn't a prompt you typed. It was a paid feature in Epik, a photo-editing app. You uploaded 8 to 12 photos of yourself and chose standard, $5.99 for results within 24 hours, or express, $9.99 within two hours (both on sale at $3.99 and $5.99 when CNBC tried it on 5 Oct 2023). Back came 60 '90s-style portraits: winning a science award, playing baseball, best dressed. So many people signed up that the app asked some to try later.

It was over almost as fast as it started. Searches for 'ai yearbook' took off on 29 Sep, peaked on 7 Oct, halved three days later and dropped to a tenth of the peak on 18 Oct: eleven days from peak to a tenth. Each autumn since, back-to-school season has come and gone without lifting it past a few per cent of its 2023 peak.

People still look for it. On 16 Oct 2026 Google's suggestions for 'ai yearbook trend' include 'for free', 'app', 'ai 90s yearbook trend' and 'how to do ai yearbook trend'. We don't make yearbook photos, or any photo trend. The nearest thing here is a video of you in another era: Alors on Danse puts you and a friend into a French TV sketch from 2010.

Bold Glamour and the other AI filters of 2023

Bold Glamour was the filter that made people notice AI rebuilding a face rather than painting over it, and the one they argued about. NPR reported on 9 Mar 2023 that it re-creates your nose, chin, cheeks and eyes with machine learning, and a consultant who builds filters told NPR you sometimes had to check the corner of the screen to know whether a filter was on at all. Searches peaked on 3 Mar, halved in nine days and were down to a tenth by 3 Apr.

A fortnight before it came the Teenage Look effect, which had people comparing themselves with their younger selves; Know Your Meme notes it wasn't available in the US then, and TikTok wouldn't tell BuzzFeed News how it worked. By December, TikTok's own Year on TikTok list counted cartoonifying yourself with the AI Style filter among 2023's top trends worldwide.

Filters were free and instant, and they lived inside one app. The 2026 trends work the other way round: one clip goes viral, and people put their own face into that exact clip.

Will Smith eating spaghetti, the AI video of 2023

The year's AI video wasn't a trend you joined, it was one you laughed at. On 23 Mar 2023 a Reddit user posted a clip generated from the prompt 'Will Smith eating spaghetti' with an early text-to-video model: a lopsided Smith stuffing fistfuls of pasta into his mouth with his hands. A repost on Twitter on 27 Mar picked up 4.9M views in four days, per Know Your Meme.

It wasn't a search hit at first. In 2023 it barely registered next to the yearbook (1 against 100 at their peak weeks); its searches peaked in February 2024, when Smith recreated it as a joke, which is a story for AI trends 2024. Since then it has become the clip people measure AI video against, and in the four weeks to 10 Oct 2026 its searches were still at about 15% of that 2024 peak, roughly half their level in its first week, back in March 2023. No other trend we measured here has held up as well.

When was the Wes Anderson trend?

April 2023. Euronews wrote up the 'new' TikTok trend on 21 Apr 2023: people filmed ordinary things, a train ride, a woodworking shop, a day in Paris, as symmetrical pastel scenes from a Wes Anderson film, set to Alexandre Desplat's 'Obituary'. #wesanderson had passed 500M views. TikTok later put 'acting like you're in a Wes Anderson film' on its list of the top US trends of 2023. Those videos were filmed for real.

The AI side arrived at the end of the month. Curious Refuge's fake trailer 'The Galactic Menagerie', posted on 29 Apr 2023, imagined a famous space saga as one of his films, reportedly built from AI images; by 1 May it had more than 300,000 YouTube views and over a million on Twitter (Euronews). Searches for 'wes anderson ai' peaked in the week of 30 Apr and held close to that for three weeks, the slowest fade of any 2023 trend we measured.

Pets as movie stars: the 2023 poster trend

In October 2023 pet owners started turning their dogs into the heroes of make-believe 3D-animated films, with AI posters made in Bing Image Creator. Know Your Meme traces it to Spanish-speaking Instagram: the earliest known post on 16 Oct and the first viral one on 23 Oct, with over 69,000 likes in six days. Searches for the posters peaked in the week of 29 Oct, halved by mid-November and were under a tenth of the peak by 10 Dec.

A poster is a still. The pet trends of 2026 are clips, and your pet goes into them as the whole animal: browse them in AI pet trends.

Did one of these in 2023? Start here in 2026

Every trend in the table above is over. These are live, they're video, and the free preview shows you in the clip in under a minute, before you pay anything.

1. Bulin 47 ≈382M views · 1 person · 15s If you tried Bold Glamour or the teenage filter: a filter changed your face, this keeps it yours and drops it into the biggest trend on our list this month, about 370M views across TikTok, Reels and Shorts by our estimate (16 Oct 2026). The street freestyle under red lights went up on 2 Oct 2026. Just you. See yourself in it
2. Alors on Danse ≈14M views · 2 people · 18s If you made AI yearbook photos: swap the '90s school portrait for a French TV sketch from 2010. One of you plays the tiny keyboard, the other dances into the lens. The first AI versions went up on 3 Oct 2026. Two photos, two faces. See yourself in it
3. I Wanna Love You↗ Rising ≈60M views · 1 pet · 10s If your dog got a movie poster in 2023: this time your pet is in the clip itself, in the corduroy suit the white cat wears to belt out Akon by the tennis courts. The original, posted on 1 Oct 2026, had 21.9M plays when we read it on 16 Oct. One pet, the whole animal. See yourself in it
4. Raindance ≈200M views · 2 people · 28s If you filmed your day like a Wes Anderson film: here's a cinematic shot you can stand in, the wooden pier at golden hour from Dave and Tems' January 2026 video. The biggest remake had 50.5M plays when we read it on 16 Oct 2026. You and your person. See yourself in it

What's changed since 2023

Not the speed. 2023's trends faded about as fast as this year's. The AI yearbook's searches halved three days after the peak and Bold Glamour's after nine; in 2026 Hotel Lobby took three days, and Raindance and Rumpelstiltskin seven. Five of the six 2023 trends with a clear peak in our data were below half within two weeks. Only the Wes Anderson wave took about four.

What you make. In 2023 an AI trend was a filter, an app or a still picture of you. The 2026 trends we make are remakes: one viral clip, and everyone puts their own face, a friend's or their pet into it. Remakes spread in the feed more than in search. At its peak the AI yearbook drew roughly seven to eight times the searches of 2026's biggest remakes, Hotel Lobby and Bulin 47, at theirs (rough estimates on one Google Trends scale), even though each has well over 100M views by our estimates.

The full lifespan data, 23 AI trends from 2023 to now, is in how long TikTok trends last. This year, month by month, is in AI video trends 2026.

How we dated these

Each row starts from the earliest dated post or article we could open, and its numbers are as that source reported them; we opened every article and page on 16 Oct 2026. Search curves are Google Trends, worldwide, for each trend's own search term: weekly from 1 Jan 2023 to 16 Oct 2026 (one term per pull, on 16 Oct 2026), and daily for the AI yearbook and Bold Glamour from the lifecycle dataset we built on 15 Oct. The side-by-side 2023 sizes come from two direct comparisons on 16 Oct 2026, each with the AI yearbook in it.

Google Trends gives relative interest from 0 to 100, not numbers of searches, and small terms are noisy. A term can also catch other things: 'wes anderson ai' includes people asking about the director, and the pet-poster term includes other images in the same studio style. The 28-day figures and the comparison with 2026's remakes are rougher: ratios chained across several pulls.

Spotted a wrong date, or a 2023 AI trend we've missed? Email [email protected] and we'll check it and fix the page.