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\n Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photo Mary Salen\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Recently, I Googled my own name. I sometimes do this for perhaps an odd reason: to find photos of myself and my late father, the actor Peter Boyle. A search for me usually churns up old pictures of us together \u2014 sometimes images I\u2019ve never seen, revealing moments I\u2019d forgotten, like a photo of us at an Addams Family screening in matchy-matchy puffer coats or an FAO Schwarz event in the late \u201980s, my mouth agape at attending a party inside a toy store and my dad resigned, sweetly schlepping the swag bag with one arm in a sling.<\/p>\n
Skimming through the results this time, though, I came across an odd headline. \u201cLucy Boyle: A Legacy of Talent, Intellect, and Quiet Success in American Arts and Culture,\u201d declared a website called Todays Magazine. Puzzled, I clicked. It looked like a typical celebrity puff piece, only the pictures were not of a celebrity \u2014 they were of me. Me, whose success thus far has been so quiet only dogs can hear it. Dogs and now maybe the robots that are quietly writing up to 50 percent of the articles on the internet. As I scrolled down, an uncanny valley of prose opened up before me and it became clear: I\u2019d been slopped. Nepo-slopped.<\/p>\n
\u201cLucy Boyle\u2019s life story offers a compelling counter-narrative to the typical Hollywood legacy arc,\u201d intoned the first paragraph. The overblown style applied to my relatively minor nepo-baby status made me laugh out loud. My dad had played the tap-dancing monster in Mel Brooks\u2019s Young Frankenstein and Ray\u2019s dad on the \u201990s sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, along with a number of other beloved character roles. I, on the other hand, went to grad school for acting, graduated six months before my dad\u2019s death in 2006, and moved out to Los Angeles for my first pilot season hobbled by grief. A couple of years later, I threw in the towel, moved back east, and devoted myself to writing, though I knew it wasn\u2019t exactly an easier path. Or, as the article put it: \u201cBorn into fame yet raised with restraint, she exemplifies how creative inheritance can coexist with independence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baffled by this AI-generated version of my life, I went down the rabbit hole. I found pieces about me on sites with names like Daily Celebs and Binge Saga. The latter<\/a> claimed to have the \u201cUntold Story\u201d<\/a> about me, an account that included particularly daffy word salads such as \u201cHer childhood lifestyle helped her understand creativity not as a performance but as a lived experience.\u201d Another site paired its slop with pictures of two different people, one a little girl and one a 20-something woman, neither of whom are me. All of the sites had no compunction about posting private information like my weight and birth date \u2014 made-up but nonetheless publicly stated as fact.<\/p>\n And it wasn\u2019t just me. Across various sites was a vast universe of AI-generated drivel about every kind of nepo relation you could imagine. Parents, siblings, spouses, and ex-spouses of even minor celebrities were featured with SEO-optimized headlines like \u201cWho is Simon Luckinbill? The Real Life of Lucille Ball\u2019s Grandson<\/a>\u201d and \u201cWho is Shamicka Gibbs? The Untold Story of Martin Lawrence\u2019s Ex-Wife, Her Net Worth, Family, and Career<\/a>.\u201d Want to curl up with a deep dive on Jack Nicholson\u2019s daughter? How about his unacknowledged biological son? Or every single person he\u2019s related to? At times, the pieces seemed to pull from each other, creating a mise en abyme of celebrity kin, a hall of mirrors with more nepos than a royal wedding at Versailles.<\/p>\n Reading through the endless entries, I discovered that nepo slop as a literary genre has several hallmarks. A hagiographic tone, honed by AI\u2019s well-documented sycophancy, runs through all of these stories. The relentless flattery also has the advantage of ensuring subjects probably won\u2019t, or can\u2019t, sue for defamation. Another common trope: the idealization of nepos who shun the spotlight, elevating the Nick Carraways of the world over the Gatsbys. The piece \u201cWho is Kel Geddes? All about Anne Geddes\u2019s Husband and His Life Story<\/a>\u201d praises the spouse of the baby photographer because he is \u201cnot known for his flashy celebrity behavior.\u201d But the bots\u2019 preference for lesser-known nepos may have a practical component too: Without widespread media coverage of the subjects, the claims are less easily checked.<\/p>\n Like mine, most articles contained errors, none more glaring than when, in the middle of a profile of Rowan Atkinson\u2019s son, I clicked on yet another untold story: the tale of Charity Nye, daughter of Bill Nye the Science Guy. The pictures in this piece were particularly bizarre, showing Nye p\u00e8re and fille as a Dancing With the Stars couple. I clicked on another Charity profile and discovered a similar shot, but in this one, Nye\u2019s features were warped by heavy AI retouching and the busty blonde claiming to be his daughter looked particularly uncanny. The article\u2019s praise of Charity\u2019s dedication to privacy reached new levels of hyperbole: This nepo was so elusive she spurred the bots to meditate on the nature of existence. One site opined that Charity\u2019s \u201cnear-total absence from public life raises a broader question worth sitting with: does being related to someone famous obligate a person to also be public? Her example suggests the answer is no.\u201d Reading this, I began to wonder: Was Charity so elusive because she was so classy \u2014\u00a0or because she didn\u2019t exist?\u00a0<\/p>\n