Where Are All The Images With Hidden Words Coming From? The AI-Enabled Trend Explained

An AI art trend that requires some viewer input has become a big hit on social media, with computer-generated images of innocuous-looking things giving way to deeper messages under further scrutiny. If you've seen one of these photos floating around the internet, you know that the "hidden word" in the image can be hard to see at first, with many such words being completely unrelated to the content forming it.

Here's the scoop on how people are making these images of hidden words in AI art and a recap of some of the more popular photos being shared online.

Where Do The AI Art Images With Hidden Words Come From?

Sometime in July 2023, Redditor /u/Ordinary_Ad_404 posted to the Stable Diffusion subreddit to share how they insert words into the landscape of their AI-generated art. An example of the art style can be seen below, with the words "New York" spelled out in a city skyline.

A month before the aforementioned image was posted to Reddit, people were already discussing how to embed a "hidden" visual into a larger image. A team called Monster Labs released a package showing how they insert QR codes into other images, and AI enthusiasts used those systems to insert other things into innocuous images as well.

The Monster Lab package used a function on Stable Diffusion called Control Net, which allows users to insert two separate prompts to create an image-within-an-image.

A popular example of an image using this double-prompt, "image-in-image" function is Spiral Town, an optical illusion that nestles a spiral into a brick building scene.

What Are Some Examples Of Hidden Words In AI Images?

Various internet users tried their hand at making hidden word AI images, with a photo spelling out the word "OBEY" going viral on X in September 2023, while another user decided to show their attempt at hiding the word "OKAY" in an image too.

Other internet users made more complex photos, like an image of '70s era hippies spelling out the word "LOVE," or a crouched person spelling out "B" for Bitcoin.

For the full history of hidden words in AI art be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.