Amid the vampires, zombies, and ghosts out and about this Halloween, a modern monster is entering the mix: artificial intelligence.
An Instagram user named Daria (@that.f.daria) went viral for her AI-generated costume concepts, including what she described as “the only Halloween costume that actually scares me”: A personified usage limit for Claude. A short AI-generated clip of her wearing the costume has garnered two million views on Instagram, with some commenters asking where they could get their own spiky orange ensemble.
Daria followed up that post with another AI-generated costume in the same vein, this time the ChatGPT logo with its own “limit reached” message pasted on the front.
While commenters on Instagram laughed at Daria’s costume concepts, they weren’t such a big hit on other platforms. When screenshots of Daria’s ChatGPT costume and of another creator’s AI-generated take on her Claude costume made their way to X, users said they were a sign of the end times. “Send the flood,” reads one simple response with more than 354,000 views.
“Literally cannot understand how much AI you have to be using to experience this and be upset about it,” another user wrote. “Are you just having none of your own thoughts at all?”
Night of the living AI
After going viral, Daria decided to make her Claude costume in real life. That entailed drafting a pattern in the shape of the Anthropic logo, then stuffing orange fabric with foam.
Though Daria’s results remain to be seen, she also posted about starting “a global trend,” sharing screenshots of several other accounts that had generated their own takes on her Claude costume, as well as one so-called “scammer” who’d apparently taken her photos and claimed to be selling the costume for $109.99.
“They’re using both screenshots of me AND AI-generated images of ‘me,’” Daria wrote in her caption. “I’m happy to inspire people. I’m less happy to become the unpaid face of someone else’s scam.”
Hungry for brains . . . or brainrot
While Daria is DIY-ing a real version of her Claude costume, other AI-inspired creations are already for sale in costume shops.
Spirit Halloween, for one, offers costumes based on AI-generated “Italian brainrot” characters, including Tung Tung Tung Sahur (an anthropomorphic wooden drum wielding a baseball bat) and Ballerina Cappuccina (a ballerina with—you guessed it—a cappuccino for a head).
Whether these costumes will actually prove popular is another question entirely, but Reddit users who identified themselves as Spirit Halloween employees confirmed that they’ve made at least some sales of the AI-inspired costumes. Retailing at $44.99, the Tung Tung Tung Sahur costume is sold out online in all but one size.
