The gift has a message about the past. If you have not heard, we lived much better on not so old days of mixtapes and Jordache Jeans. Nostalgia is spreading widely on social networks, delivered in an organized package generated by artificial intelligence.
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In a video set in the summer of 2000 and shared on Tiktok by a user named Nostalgia Cat, a young man with spiked hair tells us that there was “conversations, no direct messages, just stories around the fire until in the morning.” He, like everything and everyone in the clip, is an AI creation.
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Nostalgia Cat is not alone. Video creators throughout social media are using tools like Midjourney and Davinci decides to make increasingly impressive movies. And for thousands of people who don’t look carefully or who haven’t been born in the 1990s, these nostalgia posts may well be authentic.
“There is a real curiosity about a time before telephone dominance of social life,” said Sean Monahan trend expert. “AI is strangely a technology that looks back,” he added.
“All these great language models are ultimately compositions of information from the past”
Although “hallucinations” of AI appear in the videos (a scene from a small town in Indiana, for example, shows a main street, but the cars are parked in the same direction on both sides of the street and a car is driving on the other hand), the videos may still seem reasonably convincing.
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Most comments on the Nostalgia Cat video seems to point to a great longing for the days of the Flip and ‘Nnsync mobile phones.
It turns out that the 80s were also great. A post generated by Ia in the Instagram account Prest Nostalgia, which has over 775,000 followers, shows a “Tuesday morning,” as a man with a folder walks along a suburban street bathed by golden light.
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Rapper Vanilla Ice was one of the hundreds of people who commented in a 80s themed video generated by AI that invited contemporary viewers to “come enjoy.”
“Computers ruined the world,” wrote Vanilla Ice – Real Name: Robert Van Winkle – in the comments section. When contacted about the comment, 57 -year -old Van Winkle reinforced his opinion in an interview, arguing that the internet eroded the shared joys of American pop culture. “It was nowhere but to be a slope below,” he said.
Many of these videos present frighteningly realistic teenagers who briefly pause the healthy activity they are doing to inform the viewer that the internet has killed spontaneity and joy. How would they know from the internet, if they come from a pre-internet era? The videos do not reconcile these logical flaws, and this failure is one of the things that makes them strange.
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Some observers discard the nostalgic content and express anxiety about their proliferation.
“AI is a tremendous tool to portray a reality that never existed,” wrote Richard Hoeg, a lawyer in his 40s who manages the virtual channel Legality on Youtube, in an email. Hoeg said that although he never “glamorized” the 80’s, he felt the “unreal of the AI” of the content that portrays an idealized version of that decade acting on him. He wondered about the broader implications of such an emotionally effective message.
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Josh Crowe, 29, from England, who manages Prest Nostalgia while living in Bali, said he doesn’t bother with criticism that he and others are polluting the internet with ahistoric content. “I’m just trying to focus on bringing positive vibrations,” he said.
Crowe creates its content using a mixture of “Real Reference Images, restored and recreated by AI” and “Purely Precise Prompt Engineering.” He then uses Photoshop to “clean deformations, such as extra fingers.” He does not claim precision.
The goal of nostalgia is to remember only the good things. And today, social media platforms like Tiktok and Instagram are full of positive vibrations about renting videos on blockbuster and spending time at the mall. “Are you stressed there with likes and followers? Here, we only live,” says a visitor from the 90s.
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“When people are anxious and uncertain about the future, they naturally resort to the past for comfort and guidance”
Routledge wrote about nostalgia in a recent article on the New York Times and said, according to their research, young people are increasingly nostalgic. “We must wait more,” he said.
The combination of real -world nostalgia with digital manipulation was probably inevitable. Scott Anderson, a minneapolis web developer, noticed the trend in May. His youtube habits reflected a “moderate.” Nostalgia. Suddenly he saw himself watching a video about “15 forgotten sandwiches,” which he realized to be probably generated by AI. Anderson wondered, “How worse is this going to be?”
Four months later, we have an answer. Crowe said she has been gaining followers so quickly – about 115,000 a month – that what started as a hobby is becoming an opportunity. He is launching a store and working in a book.
Tavaius Dawson, 26, has seen similar growth in the nostalgia maximal, which has over 800,000 Instagram followers and over 250,000 on Tiktok. Several times this summer, Dawson saw his accounts earn 30,000 new followers in one day. A version of his 80’s clip was seen 27 million times in the X, although the post has not given due credit to Dawson, the father of two children who live in Florida and is now dedicated full time to nostalgic content creation.
“I want it to be an escape, a safe space,” said Dawson about his page, which has videos of themed nostalgia of cities (Los Angeles, 1989; Chicago, 1982). Aspiring the filmmaker with love for John Hughes’s films, Dawson writes scripts and creates storyboards for each of his clips, which take about an hour to make.
Dawson said he received messages from people in Ukraine and Israel who praised their content for offering a relief from the harsh realities of war. “It made me cry,” said Dawson. He is now working with a Hollywood producer in a 90’s movie.
Gunnar Zyl, 37, who lives in Berlin, began the nostalgia voyages in the fall of 2024, as a way to express his affection for American culture. Along with Midjourney, he uses editing tools like Capcut to create slideshows and videos with titles such as “Life in the City, 80s” and “Looks House.” The account has 62,000 followers.
“I often look at old photographs, movies or advertisements like inspiration,” Zyl said in an email. “My process is intuitive. I focus on recreating the imperfections of analog media, the look of Polaroids, VHS or 35mm movie, because these textures carry emotional weight and make the scenes look more authentic.”
The images themselves, however, are difficult to distinguish from those of nostalgia, Cat nostalgia or many other accounts that occupy the nostalgic generation space.
In a turnaround, the same tools that were accused of distorting reality are helping to remember times when the facts seemed more stable.
“Living as we live in a time of fragmented attention, fragmented politics and fragmented norms, is it to be admired that people prefer to spend the time being slightly scolded by children of the 80s generated by AI that seem to know what the world is about what to try to understand our own chaotic times?” He questioned Christine Rosen, a cultural critic of Commentary magazine and, at the age of 52, a “proud Gen X.”
But the desire for a better world, she said in an interview, “will remain dissatisfied – and perhaps worsened – by sinking into the AI -generated mud.”
Some users simply do not buy the tendency of nostalgia, pointing out issues such as the fact that people already had cell phones in the summer of 2000.
Van Winkle says he recommends to his daughters to get involved in activities that children from previous generations did, “Go out,” he said. “Go up on a tree.”
The middle-aged star has a similar message for those who are willing, according to his 1990 music, to stop, collaborate and listen: “Get out of the cyber world immediately,” he said.
c.2024 The New York Times Company
