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OpenAI launched ChatGPT Images 2.6, and the first GIF to go viral on my feed was about OpenAI's own CEO.
IYKYK.
So I did the obvious thing and turned myself into a GIF. It took one prompt to make me a news anchor and one more for ChatGPT to mix me up with a donkey.
Both are below, with the prompts, so you can make yours in two minutes.
A word from two tools that won’t mix me up with a donkey.
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I made two GIFs (one of them is me)
Test 1: The news anchor
Make a looping cartoon GIF of @Vaibhav as a TV news anchor fact-checking a fictional politician called 'Ghoda-ji' (Donkey face) whose speech bubble grows longer with every promise until it pops. Bold caption at the bottom: 'PROMISE COUNT: ∞'. Flat colours, fixed camera, 8 frames, last frame matches the first.
Yes, ghoda means horse. I asked for a donkey face anyway, which felt right for a neta. I kept him fictional on purpose, since a real neta was always going to risk a refusal.
It came back as asked, and every word on screen was readable, down to the infinity sign.
Then I typed one change: "Make the anchor doze off and wake up in shock when it pops."
In the edit, Ghoda-ji was the one with his eyes closed while I stayed wide awake. The model had to guess who "the anchor" was, and it guessed wrong.
Test 2: The mascot
For this one I skipped my reference and asked for a made-up character.
Make a looping GIF of a flower-faced girl at a laptop typing a prompt; a tiny robot pops out of the screen, hands her a finished slide deck and salutes. Caption: 'Prompted. Done.' Clean cartoon style, plain background, fixed camera, return to the starting pose.
She kept the same flower face in every frame and the caption came out clean, which is good news if your brand has a mascot.
Meta and Apple got here first
WhatsApp has had an Animate button for AI images since 2024, buried a few taps deep. Apple’s Genmoji, which I called the most useless AI feature ever created last year, still makes stickers that don’t move.
Both were built for sending a reaction to a friend inside their own apps.
OpenAI is going after people who post, and this model mostly keeps your face the same from frame to frame, which you need before you’d put it in front of thousands of followers.
Steal these before you make yours
The biggest prompt library on GitHub for OpenAI’s image model, with 500+ examples and around 35k stars. It has a Characters & People section for your mascot.
Written for developers, but two tips work in plain ChatGPT. Put any on-screen text in quotes, and when you edit, say “change only X” and list what should stay the same. That second one would have saved my anchor.
Free, no sign-up, and it gets your GIF under the upload limits below.
Before you post yours
My Take
Meta and Apple had more than a year’s head start and still couldn’t turn this into a habit.
OpenAI’s version might not stick either, but it’s the first one that hands you a file of your own face you’d be happy to post.
My guess is your feed fills up with everyone’s GIF self waving and winking for the next week, and by week 2 you’ll scroll past them like you scroll past every other trend.
The ones people will still stop for are GIFs with an idea in them, because everyone has the same tool now.
I also think saved references become part of your personal brand kit, the way a decent headshot is today, except this one can turn into whatever your next post needs.
Hit reply with the best one you make, and I’ll feature my favourite next week.
Until next time,
Vaibhav 🤝
