Who is nostalgic for artificial intelligence?

He was there The recent deluge of generative AI videos It features strangely fresh-faced teens who are nostalgic about how much better the world was during the 1980s and 1990s. As the AI ​​guys smile and show off their period-specific haircuts, the clips cut into dreamlike shots of sunny cul-de-sacs and vintage cars while songs like “Everyone wants to rule the world” and tracks inspired by Donkey Kong country Soundtrack Playing in the background. It’s all very weird, like bragging that you peaked in high school.

As strange as the videos are, it’s relatively easy to understand the business logic here. On one level, this content appeals to people’s fascination with the past — especially younger viewers whose lack of direct experience with these eras can make it easier to overlook the outdated details that generative AI models tend to include in their video output. But these videos also conjure an idealized vision of the past where everyone is beautiful, most people are white, and they all have an inexplicable knowledge of how exhausting life is in the year 2025. This kind of nostalgia is the neoconservative fantasy of people allergic to the open books of history.

But it’s much harder to parse the reasons behind some of the more ridiculous AI clips that have emerged showing long-dead celebrities doing things they never actually did. There are countless videos of stars behaving in ways that do not correspond to reality: Michael Jackson steals fried chicken, Stephen Hawking competes in the X Games, Einstein became UFC champion, Bob Ross is arrested by the cops To…paint murals without a permit(?), Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana fight in a WWE promotional match. The rampant racism, ableism and sexism depicted in the clips makes them all feel like they’re in the gutter Family man The masks are cut off. But in Sora, this kind of trivial “comedy” seems to be the thing everyone is interested in.

For some reason, Fred Rogers is often the focus of these clips where you can see him rapping with Tupac, harassing women like Marilyn Monroe, and Showing off a closet full of guns. None of these deepfakes are particularly convincing, and most still carry watermarks indicating they were created using OpenAI’s Sora model. But as terrible as this decline is, it’s everywhere, and the viewing numbers suggest that – regardless of whether it’s out of love, hate or ambivalence – people can’t stop themselves from watching. At least, that’s probably what the team behind OpenAi said The social video app was launched recently He wants you to think.

It’s pretty clear what OpenAI stands to gain from flooding the Internet with Sora-created videos. Content is another vehicle for the company To promote its technology And normalize people’s ideas Log in to the ramp factory As a way to entertain themselves. This appears to be the endgame for the Sora app, where creating a video is as simple as typing a few sentences into the prompt box. OpenAI and its competitors all want to be seen as springs from which a revolutionary new kind of art has arisen — one that gives people the ability to express their creativity in ways never before possible.

The people who make these videos like Jake Paul, Snoop Dogg, and Shaquille O’Neal have clearly bought into this idea, or at least got paid to pretend they did in order to convince their gullible fans that major descent from the trough is, in fact, cool. But when you watch enough of this stuff (and it’s not a lot), what becomes clear is how unimaginative and unfunny it is. You also get the distinct sense that none of these creators have the ability to imagine things beyond “What if this dead celebrity did some weird shit that would give their customers heart attacks?”

The content of these videos speaks a lot about the current state of the AI ​​generation. But it says more about how the output of this technology will gradually be affected The death of monoculture.

Although some have argued that a community feels more cohesive when everyone watches the same TV shows and movies—the legendary work conversation around the water cooler—monoculture has not been without its drawbacks. This was a time when popular cultural decision-making power was concentrated within a select group of, usually, old white men. Monocultures have created structural barriers around making art for the masses, and new technologies like the Internet and social media have given people a way around gatekeepers.

It is no coincidence that many AI founders lean heavily toward the idea that their products are designed to empower people and “democratize” artistic creativity. That was a promise anyway. But when you scroll through the Sora app and see dozens of videos that repeat the same basic claims like “A celebrity or animal was pulled over by police on suspicion of drunk driving,” it’s hard not to see the platform as a place where users are encouraged to double down on familiar archetypes rather than making something truly original, or even remotely interesting.

Aside from the Sam Altmans of the world who would directly benefit from this content, it’s hard to know who this type of video is for and what they’re supposed to find funny in it. There’s an argument that this nonsense was meant to attract Zoomers and the Gen Alpha kids who have them He claimed that Brainrot is part of their identity. But the humorous element in these videos is not quite that a job If you don’t have an understanding of who these people created by AI are. Without this context, funny sentences become much uglier. Fred Rogers’s flirtation with Marilyn Monroe is now “here’s an old man sex pest”; Stephen Hawking Now “This man has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and uses a wheelchair.”

Although AI proponents insist that this technology can generate meaningful art, Sora’s app really demonstrates the formulaic derivation that makes it easy to dismiss these types of videos as sloppy. It all feels like content designed with social media reach in mind rather than creative human expression. These clips may have an impressive number of views online, but “bump” is not a reliable measure for determining whether they will have any real staying power.

To insist that AGI videos of Jeffrey Epstein walking out of a courtroom is “the future of entertainment” or reflects young people’s taste when it comes to media is a vicious insult to their intelligence. This idea suggests that people do not value quality, cannot, or see their own interest as something to work for. We are constantly told that this technology is getting better by the day, and so is “good” AI content Just around the corner. So where are the good things? How many billions more dollars do we need to pump into the AI ​​hype cycle before it produces something worth thinking about or remembering for more than a moment?

This all sounds like a flashy trend aimed at convincing people that the new generation of AI is worth getting excited about. Video trends seem like they are destined to disappear quickly because there are so many of them. So far, the only promise that AI has delivered is its size. But it also means that we get tired of it more quickly because we are constantly drowning. And once there’s a cool new AI fad that people can focus on, it’s easy to imagine that everyone forgets that this moment of decline ever happened.