It is an irony of sorts. At a time when AI has offered the time travel delusion of how one would have looked like in the eighties, Technopark, the petri dish in which Kerala grew its IT industry, has refused to take the ride. Instead of AI-generated pictures, Technopark used the occasion to provide raw digitally untouched images of how its journey began in the 90s.

Technopark's non-AI retro images were featured on its Facebook page. These sepia-tinted pictures of its beginnings are arranged haphazardly on an old stained-edged card. Below them are the words: "Dear AI, Thank you for taking everyone back in time. You surely made them look good. But we didn't need a prompt for this one—we were already there, laying the first stone of India's first IT Park, in 1990. Some legacies don't need to be generated. They're built,” a post in the Technopark’s Facebook page said.

The viral 80s AI photo trend lets users upload selfies to ChatGPT or other AI tools to transform their modern portraits into retro 1980s looks that make it seem as if the whole world was a glittering discotheque. Ranging from common man to celebrities, the retro trend has taken social media by storm as people are using various AI tools to recreate vintage-style portraits and sharing them online.

Interestingly, 'Technopark retro' is shorn of all dazzle. One of the photographs is a large open pit, the nothingness from which Technopark came up. 

There is also a photograph of the black granite stone that was erected on the day the foundation stone for Technopark was laid. Another is of the then Chief Minister E K Nayanar walking up the steps of the Park Centre, along with its founding CEO G Vijayaraghavan. Message was Technopark required no AI embellishment to tell its growth story.

Technopark, which is also the country's first IT Park, was established in 1990. The foundation was laid, as the black granite says, on March 31, 1991. From just two companies, 155 employees and a built-up space of 1.07 lakh square feet in 1994, Technopark is now spread over 768.63 acres with IT built-up space of 13.075 million square feet and hosts 540 companies with more than 84,000 employees.