You will also know about the boomer-AI love affair if you’ve happened to blow the dust off your old Facebook account in the last year or so. Facebook is now full of AI “slop” images which, despite their brain-scrambling strangeness, are lapped up by the platform’s older audience. Shrimp Jesus, for example, which looks more or less as you’d expect, and which has earned hundreds of “amen”s in the comment sections. Other favorites include supposed photos of couples taken decades apart, and Peter Griffin from Family Guy handing out food to malnourished African children. And a lot more Jesus stuff.
Scroll through these comments and you’ll see that many, many of the world’s aunts and grandads are into this stuff. Do they believe it’s “real”, whatever that word still means in relation to the modern internet? This is a generation that didn’t grow up on the internet and, as per the stereotypes of older boomers in particular, sometimes struggled to send emails before finally getting the hang of their iPads. Their digital literacy can be scant, especially compared to zoomers raised on TikToks and esoteric memes.
Even if they understand it all perfectly well, the existential terror that AI raises in many millennials and Gen Zs is less likely to apply to boomers. If you are either retired or at the peak of your seniority in the workplace, the ominous aura of job-shredding that hangs over AI is unlikely to bother you. It’s fun, and occasionally useful, rather than a threat—typing “banana in a fedora” into a website, then seeing a picture of a banana in a fedora, is not quite as thrilling when that website might evaporate your livelihood within the decade. The fundamental cringe-ness of AI images— derivative, bland, smooth and (as with most of the Facebook slop) cloyingly sentimental—fits with a generation that can’t help but be cringe too, given they’ve aged out of any contact with the zeitgeist. It’s a union made in shrimp-Jesus heaven.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
