The present has a message about the past. In case you hadn’t heard, we had it so much better in the not-all-that-olden days of mixtapes and Jordache denim vests.
The nostalgia is spreading far and wide on social media, delivered in a tidy package generated by artificial intelligence.
In one of the videos, set around the summer of 2000 and shared on TikTok by a user who goes by Nostalgia Cat, a young man with spiked hair tells us there were, “No chats, no DMs, just stories around the fire ’til morning.” He, like everything and everyone else in the clip, is an AI creation.
Nostalgia Cat is not alone. Video creators throughout social media are using tools including Midjourney and DaVinci Resolve to make increasingly impressive movies. And to thousands of people who aren’t looking closely, and don’t know better because they had yet to be born in the 1990s, these nostalgia posts might as well be the genuine article.
“There’s a real curiosity about a time before phones dominating social life,” said trend forecaster Sean Monahan. “AI, weirdly, is a backward-looking technology,” he added. “All these large language models are ultimately composites of information from the past.”
Though AI “hallucinations” sneak into the shots (a small-town Indiana scene, for example, shows a two-way Main Street, only the cars are parked in the same direction on both sides of the street and a car is driving on the wrong side of the road) the videos can still pass as somewhat convincing.
Most of the comments on Nostalgia Cat’s video seemed to point to a huge reserve of longing for the days of flip phones and ’NSync.
It turns out, the 1980s were also great. An AI-generated post from the Instagram account Purest Nostalgia, which has more than 775,000 followers, shows a “peaceful Tuesday morning,” as a man with a briefcase walks down a suburban street showered with golden light.
Rapper Vanilla Ice was one of several hundred people to leave a comment on an ’80s-themed AI-generated video that invited contemporary viewers to “come hang.”
“Computers have ruined the world,” Vanilla Ice – real name: Robert Van Winkle – wrote in the comments section. When contacted about the comment, Van Winkle, 57, doubled down, arguing in an interview that the internet eroded the shared joys of American pop culture. “It’s gone nowhere but downhill,” he said.
Many of these videos feature unnervingly realistic teens who briefly pause whatever wholesome activity they are doing to inform the viewer that the internet killed spontaneity and joy. How would they know about the internet, if they come from a pre-internet era? The videos do not reconcile these logical breaks, and their failure to do so is one of the things that makes them uncanny.
Some observers dismiss nostalgia content and express anxiety about its proliferation.
“AI is a tremendous tool to depict a reality that never was,” Richard Hoeg, an attorney in his mid-40s who runs the Virtual Legality channel on YouTube, wrote in an email. Hoeg said that although he had never before “glamorized” the 1980s, he nevertheless felt the “AI unreality” of content depicting an idealized version of that decade working on him. He wondered about the broader implications of such emotionally effective messaging.
Josh Crowe, a 29-year-old from England who runs Purest Nostalgia while living in Bali, said he isn’t fazed by criticism that he and others are polluting the internet with ahistoric content. “I’m just trying to focus on bringing positive vibes,” he said.
Crowe creates his content by using a mix of “real reference images, restored and recreated by AI” and “purely accurate” prompt engineering. He then uses Photoshop for “cleaning up deformations, like extra fingers.”
He makes no claim of accuracy.
The whole point of nostalgia is to remember only the good stuff. And these days, social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are brimming with positive vibes about renting videos from Blockbuster and hanging out at the mall. “You’re out there stressing about likes and followers? Here, we just live it,” says a visitor from the ’90s.
“When people feel anxious and uncertain about the future, they naturally turn to the past for comfort and guidance,” said Clay Routledge, director of the Human Flourishing Lab at Archbridge Institute. Routledge, who wrote about nostalgia in a recent New York Times guest essay, said his research has found that young people are becoming increasingly nostalgic. “We should expect more of it,” he said.
The marriage of real-world nostalgia and digital tinkering was probably inevitable. Scott Anderson, a Minneapolis web developer, noticed the trend in May. His habits on YouTube reflected his “moderate” nostalgia. Suddenly, he found himself watching a video about “15 forgotten sandwiches,” which he eventually realized was likely generated by AI. Anderson wondered, “How much worse is this all going to get?”
Four months later, we have an answer. Crowe said he has been gaining followers so rapidly – about 115,000 per month – that what started as a hobby is becoming an opportunity. He is launching a store and working on a book.
Tavaius Dawson, 26, has seen similar growth on Maximal Nostalgia, which has more than 800,000 followers on Instagram and more than 250,000 on TikTok. Several times this summer, Dawson saw his accounts gain 30,000 new followers in a day. A version of his clip about the ’80s has been viewed 27 million times on X, though the poster did not properly credit Dawson, a father of two who lives in Florida and now devotes himself full-time to nostalgic content creation.
“I want it to be an escape, a safe space,” Dawson said of his page, which has city-themed nostalgia videos (Los Angeles, 1989; Chicago, 1982). An aspiring filmmaker with a fondness for John Hughes movies, Dawson writes scripts and creates storyboards for each of his clips, which take about an hour to create.
Dawson said he has received messages from people in Ukraine and Israel that praise his content for offering a respite from grim wartime realities. “It brought me to tears,” Dawson said. He said he is now working with a Hollywood producer on a ’90s film.
Gunnar Zyl, 37, who lives in Berlin, started the account Nostalgia Voyages in the fall of 2024, as a way to express his fondness for American culture. Along with Midjourney, he uses editing tools including CapCut to create slideshows and videos with titles such as “City Life, 1980s” and “Feels Like Home.” The account has 62,000 followers.
“I often look at old photographs, films, or advertising as inspiration,” Zyl said in an email. “My process is intuitive. I focus on re-creating the imperfections of analog media, the look of Polaroids, VHS, or 35mm film, because those textures carry emotional weight and make the scenes feel more authentic.”
The images themselves, though, are difficult to distinguish from those of Maximal Nostalgia, Nostalgia Cat or the many other accounts crowding the nostalgia-generation space.
In a twist, the same tools that have been accused of distorting reality are helping recall times when facts seemed more stable.
“Living as we do in a time of fractured attention, fractured politics, and fractured norms, is it any wonder people would rather spend time being mildly scolded by AI-generated ’80s kids who seem to know what the world is about than to try to make sense of our own chaotic times?” wondered Christine Rosen, a culture critic at Commentary magazine and, at 52, a “proud Gen X-er.”
But the longing for a better world, she said in an interview, “will remain unsatisfied – and perhaps be made worse – by wallowing in AI slop.”
Some users simply don’t buy the nostalgia trend in the first place, pointing out issues like the fact that people had cellphones in the summer of 2000.
Van Winkle says he tells his own daughters to engage in some of the same activities children of earlier generations did: “Go outside,” he said. “Go climb a tree.”
The middle-aged onetime star has a similar message for anyone willing, per his 1990 song, to stop, collaborate and listen: “Get out of the cyber world immediately,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.