{"id":300571,"date":"2025-11-22T02:52:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T02:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/300571\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T02:52:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T02:52:08","slug":"who-is-ai-nostalgia-slop-even-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/300571\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is AI nostalgia slop even for?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been a recent deluge of generative AI videos<\/a> featuring uncannily fresh-faced teens waxing nostalgic about how much better the world was during the \u201980s and \u201990s. As the AI youths smize and show off their period-specific haircuts, the clips cut to dreamlike footage of sun-drenched cul-de-sacs and vintage cars while songs like \u201cEverybody Wants to Rule the World<\/a>\u201d and tracks inspired by the Donkey Kong Country soundtrack<\/a> play in the background. It\u2019s all very weird \u2014 like bragging that you peaked in high school.<\/p>\n

As strange as the videos are, there is a relatively easy to understand logic at work here. On one level, this content appeals to people\u2019s fascination with the past \u2014 especially younger viewers whose lack of firsthand experience with these eras can make it easier to overlook the anachronistic details generative AI models are prone to including in their video output. But these videos are also conjuring an idealized vision of the past where everyone is beautiful, most people are white, and they all have inexplicable knowledge about how stressful life in 2025 is going to be. This kind of nostalgia is a neocon fantasy for people allergic to cracking open history books.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s much harder to parse the reasoning behind some of the more absurd gen AI clips popping up that feature long-dead celebrities doing things they never actually did. There are countless videos of stars behaving in ways that don\u2019t map onto reality: Michael Jackson stealing fried chicken<\/a>, Stephen Hawking competing at the X Games<\/a>, Einstein becoming a UFC champion<\/a>, Bob Ross getting busted by the cops<\/a> for\u2026 painting murals without a permit(?), Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana fighting in a WWE promo match<\/a>. The rampant racism, ableism, and sexism depicted in the clips makes them all feel like gutter-grade Family Guy cutaway gags. But on the Sora app, this brand of garbage \u201ccomedy\u201d seems to be the thing that everybody is into.<\/p>\n

For some reason, Fred Rogers is often the focus of these clips where you can see him rapping with Tupac, perving on women like Marilyn Monroe, and showing off a closet full of guns<\/a>. None of these deepfakes are especially convincing and most of them still have watermarks indicating that they were created with OpenAI\u2019s Sora model. But as terrible as this slop is, it\u2019s everywhere, and the view counts suggest that \u2014 regardless of whether it\u2019s out of love or hate or ambivalence \u2014 people can\u2019t stop themselves from watching. At least, that\u2019s probably what the team behind OpenAi\u2019s recently launched social video app<\/a> wants you to think.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fairly obvious what OpenAI stands to gain from flooding the internet with Sora-generated videos. The content is another way for the company to promote its technology<\/a> and normalize the idea of people clocking in at the slop factory<\/a> as a way of entertaining themselves. That seems to be the endgame for the Sora app, where generating a video is as simple as typing a few sentences into a prompt box. OpenAI and its competitors all want to be perceived as wellsprings from which a new, revolutionary kind of art has emerged \u2014 one that gives people the ability to express their creativity in ways that were not possible before.<\/p>\n

The people making these videos like Jake Paul, Snoop Dogg, and Shaquille O\u2019Neal have clearly bought into that idea, or at least been paid to pretend they have in order to convince their gullible fans that mainlining slop from a trough is cool, actually. But when you watch enough of this stuff (which isn\u2019t a lot), what becomes clear is how deeply unimaginative and unfunny it is. You also get the distinct sense that none of these creators have the ability to imagine things beyond \u201cwhat if this dead celebrity did some buckwild shit that would have given their agents heart attacks?\u201d<\/p>\n

The substance of these videos speaks volumes about the current state of gen AI. But it says even more about how this technology\u2019s output has been influenced by the gradual death of monoculture<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Though some have argued that society felt more cohesive when everyone watched the same TV shows and films \u2014 the mythical work watercooler conversation \u2014 monoculture was not without its drawbacks. That was a time when the pop cultural decision-making power was concentrated within a select pool of \u2014 typically \u2014 old, white men. Monoculture created structural barriers around the business of making art for the masses, and modern technologies like the internet and social media gave people a way to work around those gatekeepers.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a coincidence that many gen AI founders have leaned heavily into the idea that their products are designed to empower people and \u201cdemocratize\u201d the creation of art. That was the promise anyway. But when you scroll through the Sora app and see dozens of videos iterating on the same basic prompts like \u201ccelebrity or animal has been pulled over by the police under suspicion of drunk driving,\u201d it\u2019s hard not to see the platform as a place where users are encouraged to double down on familiar archetypes instead of making something truly original, or even remotely interesting.<\/p>\n

Where is the \u201cgood\u201d gen AI content, exactly?<\/p>\n

Aside from the Sam Altmans of the world who stand to directly benefit from this content, it\u2019s difficult to tell who these kinds of videos are for and what they are supposed to find funny about them. There\u2019s an argument to be made that the nonsense of it all meant to appeal to Zoomers and the Gen Alpha kids who have claimed brainrot as a part of their identity<\/a>. But the humorous element of these videos doesn\u2019t exactly work if you don\u2019t have an understanding of who these AI-generated people are. Without that context, the punchlines become much uglier. Fred Rogers flirting with Marilyn Monroe is now \u201chere\u2019s an old man being a sex pest\u201d; Stephen Hawking is now \u201cthis guy has ALS and uses a wheelchair.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though AI boosters insist that this technology can generate meaningful art, the Sora app really illustrates the formulaic derivativeness that makes these types of videos easy to dismiss as slop. It all feels like content that has been engineered with social media virality in mind as opposed to creative human expression. These clips may rack up a staggering number of views online, but \u201cnumber go up\u201d is not a reliable metric to determine whether they will have any real staying power.<\/p>\n

Insisting that gen AI videos of Jeffrey Epstein being perp walked out of a courthouse is \u201cthe future of entertainment\u201d or reflective of young people\u2019s taste when it comes to media is a vicious insult to their intelligence. That idea suggests that people don\u2019t, or can\u2019t, appreciate quality or see their own attention as something that should be worked for. We are constantly being told that this technology is getting better every day, and the \u201cgood\u201d gen AI content is right around the corner<\/a>. So where is the good stuff? How many more billions of dollars do we need to pump into this AI hype cycle before it produces something worth thinking about or remembering for more than the moment?<\/p>\n

This all feels much more like a flashy trend meant to convince people the gen AI is worth getting excited about. The videos\u2019 novelties feel destined to wane rather quickly because there are so many of them floating around. So far, the only promise AI has fulfilled is its scale. But that also means we tire of it more quickly because we\u2019re constantly inundated. And once there\u2019s a new, shiny gen AI fad for folks to fixate on, it\u2019s easy to imagine everyone forgetting that this moment of slop ever happened.<\/p>\n

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Charles Pulliam-MooreAICloseAI<\/p>\n

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n

FollowFollow<\/p>\n

See All AI<\/a><\/p>\n

CultureCloseCulture<\/p>\n

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n

FollowFollow<\/p>\n

See All Culture<\/a><\/p>\n

EntertainmentCloseEntertainment<\/p>\n

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n

FollowFollow<\/p>\n

See All Entertainment<\/a><\/p>\n

Internet CultureCloseInternet Culture<\/p>\n

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n

FollowFollow<\/p>\n

See All Internet Culture<\/a><\/p>\n

TV ShowsCloseTV Shows<\/p>\n

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n

FollowFollow<\/p>\n

See All TV Shows<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There has been a recent deluge of generative AI videos featuring uncannily fresh-faced teens waxing nostalgic about how…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300572,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,2331,134,7746,105,7475],"class_list":{"0":"post-300571","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-culture","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-internet-culture","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-tv-shows"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}