Older adults know AI is slop. They just like it
Rest of World Viola Zhou
Older adults are watching AI-generated singers and virtual family members, and they know it's fake. They just don't care because it makes them feel good anyway.
Based on reporting by Rest of World, Viola Zhou — read the original for the full story.
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Uncle Chang cried the first time he watched an AI-generated singer named Rose Bennett perform a song about growing up with an alcoholic father. The 67-year-old retired businessman, visiting New York from Taiwan, saw his own childhood reflected in the video — his mother had also left, after enduring his father's abuse, and his sisters raised him instead. He later confirmed with Gemini, his go-to assistant for everything from navigation to his bee farm, that Rose and her AI brother weren't real people at all.
This isn't an isolated moment. On Douyin and Kuaishou, AI-generated babies and adult sons deliver daily blessings to older viewers, tell them how much they're missed, and even show up with virtual roses. Some AI characters play the role of virtual lovers. Tianqi Song, a Ph.D. candidate at the National University of Singapore, went looking into this trend with colleagues, reviewing more than 200 such videos and interviewing 16 Chinese internet users between the ages of 50 and 75 — people who grew up in large households but now, partly because of the country's former one-child policy, have much smaller families.
What Song's research found is that these AI relatives fill gaps real families often leave open. They say
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
,I love you
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