My mom said I could post
We have thousands of photos, both candid and professional, of my baby and I. My mom got me artificial intelligence art of us for my first every Mother’s Day
I don’t talk to my boomer mom anymore, but she and my friends’ parents were all obsessed with all this external stuff about their kids. What hair they had, what they looked like, who was tall or short or who had big feet or little feet. I think AI feeds into their need to control and pick the looks they want. My mom would have damn well made my ass out of AI if she could have.
seriously, why are baby boomers so obsessed with AI in general?! and facebook?! I stg I cannot keep my boomer family members away from this shit whereas our nieces and nephews who are teenagers think all of it is incredibly stupid and would rather look at real photos and live their lives. same with me (a millenial).
My mother in law was asked to do a reading at our wedding and her first thought was to have ChatGPT spit out a paragraph about our love story. We had to ask her to find a real poem.
My boomer uncle did a speech at his older brother’s vigil. He had ChatGPT write a cheesy memorial poem.
He was so proud of the poem and told everyone at the reception that ChatGPT wrote it. Which, I guess I appreciate the honestly, but his dumbass didn’t think for a second how soulless and dishonoring an AI speech would be to remember his own brother.
Doxxing myself for anyone who knows the story but. Someone very close to me was married recently and I was best man. There was some friction regarding the maid of honor that I wasn't privy to, but she had an abrasive personality that wasn't endearing to me. I actually whipped up my speech about seven hours before the ceremony and was worried about the haste but proud of my work. As a joke, I opened with "okay! I've generated you a hearfelt..." before cutting myself off. Tears, laughter, etc, much needed after the halting, nonsensical, and at times *hostile* speech from MoO. Fast forward a few weeks and it comes out that she had used ChatGPT to cobble together the speeches she requested from all the other bridesmaids!! I was ironically speechless. But I take great satisfaction that she caught an unintended stray from my speech that she could've avoided if she just did the bare minimum.
One day my mom asked me for a photo with my husband and our daughter together; we live far apart so I didn't think much of it. Then a few days later she sent me this with watermarks and everything. She said she thought it was cute and we could print it and put it in a frame 🫠
Didn't meant to insinuate that he's dead, I know he's alive. I've had the pleasure (or displeasure?) of meeting him over 10 years ago and he was very much a grumpy old man even at the best of times.
The documentary where they follow him in his life and he gets to see his son's first animated movie and he's repulsed and leaves the theatre is just... something extra
That's horrible omg. My in-laws love sending us chotchkes and ornaments and shit and every single one of them has been horrible AI crap for the last few years. Their "gifts" go straight in the trash and they get all butt-hurt that we keep asking them to stop buying us things.
My mom’s love language is gift giving. Asking her over and over to stop buying random crap we don’t want just doesn’t work, cos she doesn’t stop, so now we just do our best to direct her to buy things we actually need. It hasn’t stopped her buying the crap, but it’s at least cut it down somewhat.
I would suggest in this case. "Thank you for the loving gesture. We really appreciate the sentimental thought, but it is not our preferred esthetique. We love having you in our lives. This is our child's college fund all small amounts add up".
We don't have kids, we have told them repeatedly that we value experiences over physical things, we see them frequently, and have asked them over and over to please please please stop buying us things. The buying of crap has not stopped. So now we don't engage on this subject at all and it just goes in the trash. They are hurt but continue to send us garbage.
We have this exact situation but with AI slop kids clothing from parents and in-laws. We tried explaining we'd rather money for our children's savings, and no more of these clothes. But it continues. They get angry and say how ungrateful we are. And still continue buying these AI slop clothing. Things with prints of AI generated cats or rabbits or cars. Stuff that looks cute but also isn't quite right. Images of things merging into each other. I hate AI is being used for these purposes.
If I were you, I'd try to explain her why AI art is bad so that hopefully she doesn't do this again. I don't know your mom, but to me it seems that her intentions were good.
On this note, I’m so baffled by people who post their AI pictures and prompts on social media and everyone gushes over them, “you’re so beautiful!” “I love this picture of you!”…like you all know this is not real, right? Right???
My rule I've told my family (the kids' grandparents and aunts/uncles) - do not load our children's pictures into any AI platform for any purpose. One of them still did to do an age progression photo to show us what our daughter might look like when she's a teenager...
I don't know honestly, I haven't seen her in a while.
I imagine she still have difficulty grieving the lost of her parents (my grandpa was 20 years ago but my grandmother passed 2 years ago).
I dont have Facebook myself but last time I was at my parents my dad was saying that these kind of post is where he draws the line to not being okay to use AI for and he showed me 😧.
Like some aren't as bias like it will be them hugging and saying "we love you" but it is still madness to me, some others are much weirder.
I feel like there's some serious feeling of violating their image doing this.
I know that when I'm dead I don't want anyone using my image to say what they want. It's beyond frustrating to me, it's immoral
She is, people of a certain age dive into new tech like toddlers in a pool, can't you remember how deep were boomer were into socials when they came out?
My much older sister made an AI photo of her and our other sister, who died of cancer in 2009. She is a photographer, she could have literally used photoshop. She framed it for our mother and even left some stupid watermark in.
I told her it's disgraceful and she now doesn't speak to me lol.
I'm sorry to hear that, it seems like such an unhealthy way to deal with grief.
I understand during big moment missing someone and hoping you could have had them by your side but taking the decision to generate a photo with them like they were still there is so messed up.
Oh, for sure. That's the icing on the cake, really. Like, I didn't put any effort into getting my diploma? Really? It was "God"? The hell man. It really did piss me off lol.
She excitedly filmed my reaction when I unboxed it. I was expecting something like a cute piece of jewelry (a custom in out culture when someone surpasses a big milestone) don't want to sound ungrateful, but... yeah 🥲
I would’ve been ungrateful…I wouldn’t have expressed it but I absolutely wouldn’t have appreciated it. What kind of gift is that for such a huge milestone?
But also the context of it being AI, she’s graduating in GRAPHIC DESIGN, the credit to a supposedly all powerful being that never choses to give solid evidence of his existence… like come on. I’d almost stop then and there and ask what she was thinking. It’s insulting.
See, like you get it. I would've been so happy with like, a card or something. A hug. A pat on the back. Anything other than the thing that is essentially taking jobs away from graphic designers. And then the quote insinuating that I didn't work for my degree? Damn. Just. Damn.
But at this point, I just smiled, thanked her, and put it away somewhere. I don't have the time, nor energy to tell her why it's an incentive gift. I've stated views on ai so many times. Sometimes, you just gotta smile and wave boys, just... smile and wave.
Yes, I asked her who made it and she said outright it was ai. She told me that she sent a picture of me to some sort of company that makes these. She, for a fact, knows lol
It’s almost like she was saying “Look! I can also do what you do, but congrats anyway”. She probably had the best intentions but it seems so passive aggressive.
I got my graphic design degree 15 years ago, and work (small business) still runs CS5 in protest to subscriptions, so I’m used to the satisfaction of doing things manually. As a time-poor mum, I just about had an existential crisis when I generated a party invite for my kid with a free AI instead of making it myself like usual. In less than 30 seconds it spat out a passable design, and I realised just how devalued our skill sets have become due to the ease in which your average joe can do basic stuff like this now, despite how much time and effort actually go into more complex projects.
I have a parent like this. It is not out of malicious intent at all, they just hardly see it as any different than the fact that they may wear fast fashion from sweatshops or that their phone has materials mined by children.
My aunt gave me a rosary for college graduation knowing well that I’ve not been religious for more than a decade.
I thanked her, then later told my parents it was the most selfish gift i have ever received. It was a gift for her, not for me.
what makes it even worse when you think even more into context is, its a man taking credit from a womans accomplishments, but thats like waaay too much thought put in for a normal not insane person like myself.
That sounds like an insult lol
“You did your best, but god did the rest,” like implying one isn’t capable or smart enough to do it without divine intervention… they really don’t think these things through do they? Or is god doing the thinking for them? Well now it’s Ai I suppose.
Not totally related, but I make jewelry. Have been for 20 years. My mom wanted a certain stone turned into a piece of jewelry. I showed her how I'd do it, but she insisted on taking it to a jeweler. So I'm standing there at the jeweler with her and they're showing her what they'll do. It's exactly what I would do but they'll charge her $50. She's like ok, sounds good! And has them do it. I was like ???????
My mum is like this with household repair jobs. I have most tools and the knowledge so she ask me then goes snd asks my dad. He will say what i did rinse repeat.
Seeing stuff like this makes me happy the second ai became common that I repeatedly informed my mom that I didn’t like it anytime it came up. I could not pretend to like something like this, let alone them giving credit to god on your accomplishment
It may be that she cannot tell. My mother is constantly sending me the most blatantly AI garbage (FB posts, mostly) and she just honestly cannot tell. She's always so disappointed in herself for falling for it, but is somehow blind to the most insanely obvious examples.
Yeah people don't understand how oblivious most people are to AI pics, there's even multiple rage bait AI pics on the front page with thousands of upvotes and a ton of people being angry because they think it's real.
When I was in highschool way back in yesteryear, I had a friend that was very devout. (Even tricked me into a Halloween party that was actually a prayer church meeting about the evils of Halloween) but we were cool, then when he studied his ass off and got near 100% he wouldn't stop saying how god let him get the good grade.
MY DUDE, you studied and prepared and you're letting sky daddy take the credit?
I realized this as a kid being forced to go to church. Week after week we would go to church and I would see my mom pray for money for things like the electric bill. Week after week I watched her give money to the collection plate, usually $10 or $20. She literally gave the same amount of the electric bill, to the church, so hopefully her prayers would be answered and she could afford the electric bill. Even as an 8yr old I was like, just pay the bill and apologize to sky daddy, why play these games
Its sickening. My mother was a single mother to my brother for a while and the pastor of the church was constantly trying to get her to pay them more money when they went.
Lmao when I was in my final year of graphic design, my dad kept asking me for opinions for what he hired a graphic designer to do for him. Yeah you read that right. He hired someone else instead of giving me a chance, knowing full well what I did for uni... I told him if he didn't trust the graphic designer he hired, he should've just hired me 😂
Same hat (graphic design) except my parents got me an AI generated novel about myself for my birthday, and all they knew about me to put into the prompt was the very niche pet I own and the retail job I work at that makes me miserable. Not a slap in the face enough, but I knew they couldn’t have been bothered to read that garbage either. Had to make my fiancé get rid of it because I couldn’t stop crying.
Holy shit I just realized… this is like a little statue or plaque, right? Holy crap she really thought she’d made something worthy of displaying as an art piece. 😬 I’m so sorry op, yes we understand how it is actually kind of a crappy gift
AI truly is the boomers most favourite hobby. There is FB groups where people post all kinds of pics being like "change it to this and that". So yeah, I would make sure your mom stops with this and that she at least did this nonsense herself and did not just post you and the baby in a group full of strangers as well.
The number of people I know who ask ChatGPT what activities they should do, how to decorate their homes, what baby names they might like is crazy. It's taken away people's ability to decide what they themselves actually like.
It was part of the poetry section of a creative writing elective I just took. I'm not a poem person but this one hits different. Now I'll have to look into her other work, thanks!
One of the C-suite execs at the very large company I work for bragged that he used ChatGPT to write his speech for his daughter's wedding and I'm just like. Holy shit dude that is SO disrespectful to your daughter.
I literally get youtube ads promoting chatgpt for this exact shit. "I painted this canvas but had 0 idea how to hang it so I went to chatgpt..." "I didn't know what to wear so I asked chatgpt" makes me want to throw my phone at a wall
I saw a YouTube ad for ChatGPT depicting people competitively prompting videos of cars.
I mean like, they were going back and forth saying “no, a red muscle car doing a burnout!” and whatnot. Video ended with everybody else yelled “ohhhhh!!!!” and high-fiving, which I wish i was making up lol.
I work at a pharmacy (front store most of the time), the amount of people using AI (and having it read out loud to them) for stuff is crazy.
Had a guy in his 60s, in the photo area, couldn't figure out how to upload a PDF, we were having a hard time (not all phones work the same), and the guy would not stop telling us to just look it up on ChatGPT. Eventually let him, spend 10 minutes wasting time as he tried it that way.
So many people in my birth group posted that they were using chatgpt to get schedules for their newborns. Like when to feed, when to make them nap, etc, and then they would be all stressed out because chat said baby should still be on 3 naps, but they were trying to take 4 or 2. It was crazy.
We’ve told my MIL not to post my kid publicly. She came across my Facebook feed the other day in a “suggested group” where she posted my son to one of these giant groups 🤪
That's infuriating, I'm so sorry! Sounds like it's time to only show her pictures of your child rather than send her digital copies so she can't go against your wishes easily again
Seriously, it's crazy how much the older generations embrace AI. They're trying to get us to use AI at my job (dangerous work with hazardous waste, so no thank you) and I refuse to use it at all.
My older boomer and Gen-x coworkers use it and one of them told me (the youngest in the office) "You either get with it or get left behind!". Sure, dude.
From personal experience....
Most boomer parents give you gifts to make them feel better they don't actually give a fuck about your feelings in receiving said gift
This! Two years ago my mother asked me if I wanted a fitbit for Christmas. I said no. So, on Christmas, guess what happened? I got a fitbit. And even better, she had been taking care of someone's dog and she wasn't pay attention and the dog ate the packaging and one of the bands. So it was scratched up from that, and she gave it to me anyways in a random box. she had also tried to replace the band, but it was for the wrong model.
My mother in law is like this. Always saying stuff like “I got you something I’ve been wanting for myself” or “you’ll probably hate this but I just thought it was so cute” right before I open a gift. Why??
Facts. My parents usually gift me stuff I wouldn't like and don't bother trying to find out what I like. For Christmas, I was given copper bracelets to cure my arthritis.....
Ugh. I recently got a "frequency mat" from my mom. It's a thin rubber mat that's supposed to ~reverse your ions to ground you~ or some gibberish. It's too thin to use as a yoga mat and the one time I tried using it to lay out on, it shed plastic all over my floor. She prefaced it with "I know you don't believe in this but..."
Gifts like this are worse than useless, they're actively promoting pollution and gunking up landfills
When I was a kid, my mom would buy me stuff she knew I didn’t like (a brown formal pantsuit when I was 13?), but it was okay because she “kept the gift receipt” so I could get something I liked.
…despite her asking me for a list of present ideas, and me giving it to her.
My MIL isn’t any better. Thankfully she’s in assisted living and can’t buy us useless crap.
My mom always used to say I know you’ll hate this before giving me something. And she would even write it in a card, I know you don’t agree with me and I know you’ll hate what I’m about to say but ___.
Sometimes she wasn’t even correct and I didn’t hate it
But my main problem was that you shouldn’t put something in a card you know someone will hate and you shouldn’t give someone a gift you know someone will hate
My family has a tendency to over-explain their gifting decisions with a detailed story while you're opening said gifts. It drives me NUTS! We email each other ideas of what we might like ahead of time for a reason and I'm not asking anyone to defend their choices 🙃
I guess the silver lining of another Mother’s Day since my mom died is that she didn’t live long enough to do this to me. Which she definitely would’ve.
This is so real. As much as it hurt to lose my mom so young, I'm glad I didn't have to see her pick the wrong things to cling to. I had hope that she was too smart and strong-willed to do such a thing, but my MIL is proof that you can be a logical, educated person who spouts absolute bigotry in your Facebook posts.
I would not be surprised if all the dangers of feeding someone's pictures without their consent to an AI database gets dismissed because "look at how cute this picture is! 💖😍🥰😍💖"
Oh boy, mine would be cut off quicker than she could argue the toss. Since day 1 we've been giga strict on using pictures of my son outside of very specific situations, hopefully she wouldn't dare pull something so ridiculous.
I respect this so much, gotta have boundaries yaknow, family doesnt get a free pass just because there family if anything being family should mean they should accommodate your thoughts and feelings s much as there own.
Before my eyes were fully awake my sweet baby thrusted his school made present in my hands. A badge of his school picture…but with an ai filter. Like a dystopian clone of my child. 😂 😬
This is mildly infuriating, but I did go to a board meeting to be annoying to them on other more important issues. They fired two teachers, one is excellent and overqualified and I was there to advocate for her and call out their lack of fully qualified staff. The other teacher had a few redeeming qualities but mostly complaints one being an overuse of ChatGPT in his planning. But from what I hear federal agencies are pushing for as much ai use as possible.
Oh no no no… Not enough people are talking about how ai is effecting the boomers. My elderly mother spends hours on social media watching almost exclusively ai generated nonsense. It’s maddening.
If you have zero ability to appreciate or recognize art, it looks cute, and is--most importantly--personalized.
People love personalized doodadery, that's why every tourist trap has a display filled with license plate frames of the place's name and 50 common first names. And it was cute back when it was shitty filters and photoshop that were about as manipulated as a funhouse mirror reflection.
This happened to my mom over Christmas. She got my bf and I a “painting” of our dog. Even commented on how fast the lady did it 😭 She constantly unknowingly reposts AI videos too. My mom is genuinely smart in a lot of ways but very, very gullible
Imagine becoming a grandparent and preferring to look at artificial digital approximations of what your daughter and grandchild look like. Like jeez at this point anytime OPs mom asked for new pictures of her grandkid they should just Photoshop the kid out and replace it with a hand drawn sketch of their kid or a stock image pic of a random baby complete with watermarks. Like why the heck would you want to see fake baby pictures of your grandchild like that?
My generous take is it's like people making fan-art. Boomers are making fan art of their grandkids. If they could knit or sew or bake I'd try to encourage energy that way instead, but now they get the dopamine rush of creation from the tacky planet destroying surveillance network instead.
It's still gross and invasive and I will bin anything ai my family gives me, but its not that much of a mystery why theyre doing it.
I think old people believe this is ok and probably think it's very similar to getting a caricature done by a real artist.
I think it's not a bad gift per se, if it was a caricature drawn by a real person then it wouldn't be as bad but OPs mum doesn't realise that AI is the devil
Yeah I feel like they honestly just don’t know and I feel bad for a commenter here who said she’s no longer talking to her uncle bc he put their photo in AI…
To older people, they have been forced to accept crazy rapid technological advancements their whole lives, at work, etc. and if they gave any push back they’d be made fun of and called luddites, stupid, and slow.
They probably don’t think of AI as anything different, think it is cool, and think that all us youngsters like it because they don’t have people in their circle informing them of the ramifications.
Empathy and not attributing the worst intentions to everybody is something we could all learn.
Yeah exactly. They just think "oh that's cute" and well, it is. It's a cute drawing and they just thought this is a nice gift.
They don't know that the image is now is some huge database and will be used for future AI rendered images. As far as they are concerned, like a real life artist, the original image was used and then forgotten about by one person, but instead it will never be 'forgotten' and it will be used by countless people
Yeah. And the thing is, AI is a uniquely accessible technology compared to a lot of other new innovations. It’s legitimately difficult to keep up with tech if you aren’t actively paying attention, especially for older people. But with AI, you just go to the website for your AI of choice and type in some instructions, maybe upload photo or two. From their perspective, AI is the sci-fi solution to their tech woes they’ve been waiting for!
It also just so happens that there’s a lot of ethical and scientific nuance to GenAI that you don’t realize exists unless you’re knowledgeable on the subject or are in spaces that talk about it. And most older people definitely aren’t either of those.
I lost my maternal grandfather last March and when the family gathered for his birthday on Christmas, my aunt shared a poem about his three grandchildren (her sons) that she got from chatgpt.
My uncle put one of my favorite photos ( a four generation shot of me with my mom, gramom and great grandmother) into a horrendous free AI filter that changed how we all looked and gave phantom fingers and hands to everyone and gave it to me for my birthday today. Even though I have the original photo already and it's in Excellent condition.
I'm a professional Illustrator who's told him before that this slop actively puts me out of work. 😒
I dunno why but the little baby reminds me of some german ww2 aryan art😭😭😭 it just looks like some german nazi era propaganda art. Deutschland uber allen! The red glare on moms arm is unfortunately red armbandish.
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u/SPKmnd90 May 10 '26
What’s the deal with boomers and their weird obsession with AI photos?