Posting AI caricatures on social media is bad for security • The Register
Posting AI caricatures on social media is bad for security • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/11/ai_caricatures_social_media_bad_security/
Publish Date: 2026-02-11 13:56:00
Source Domain: www.theregister.com
If you’ve seen the viral AI work pic trend where people are asking ChatGPT to “create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me” and sharing it to social, you might think it’s harmless. You’d be wrong.
Fortra security analyst Josh Davies says it puts people and their employers at risk of social engineering attacks, LLM account takeovers, and sensitive data theft.
“At the time of writing, this is a hypothetical risk,” Davies told The Register. “But given the scale of participants publicly posting this trend, we believe it is highly likely that some could be exploited in this way with the LLM account takeover. The fact that users are posting this personal work information publicly and using a prompt that said ‘based on everything you know about me’ it is feasible that sensitive information related to their employer could be viewable in the prompt history if takeover is successful.”
As of February 8, Davies says 2.6 million of these images have been added to Instagram with links to users’ profiles, including both private and public accounts. “I am currently looking through different posts, and have identified a banker, a water treatment engineer, HR employee, a developer and a doctor in the last 5 posts I viewed,” he said in a Wednesday blog.
Caricature of a tech reporter – Click to enlarge
Sometimes the model will ask the user for more context before it creates their cartoon image. But even without those extra details, these caricatures signal to an attacker that the person uses an LLM at work – meaning there’s a chance they input company data into a publicly available model.
As The Register has previously reported, many employees use personal chatbot accounts to help them do their jobs, and most companies have no idea how many AI agents and other systems have access to their corporate apps and data.
“Many users do not…
