It’s a series of cross-posts on Facebook: a boy and his grandmother, with immaculate headscarves, looking directly into the lens; In front of them there are cakes on the oilcloth. A few posts later, it is a super-centenarian grandmother who presents her latest crochet creation, or a pretty shepherdess in a camouflage suit who regrets, from her meadow, “that[elle] I will never get as many likes as Lady Gaga.. Everyone is begging for ” Congratulations “ AND “grades” for his work. They receive a cascade of them from Internet users, many of whom do not know – or pretend not to know – that these people do not exist: each of these photos was generated by artificial intelligence (AI). However, certain topics leave no room for doubt: hands knitting with six fingers, older people who look like they came from an animated production, young women with almost inhuman physical proportions, etc.
Since this summer, this type of publications have multiplied online and, in particular, on the Meta social network, on pages specialized in “click trap”. Baptized traps for boomers (“baby boomer traps”), “play with credulity and emotion, seek to touch the sensitive chord” Internet users, confirms Nolwenn, founder and administrator of the fun Instagram account @avec_mon_comm_de_boomer. Since 2020, this fixed “in a good mood” the comments she considers the most distressing among those posted on the social network by its older users.
“Young people are often accused of not being careful on the Internet, but they themselves do not necessarily have the reflex to check or enlarge the photos when they have doubts”points out. And if naivety is not the prerogative of the elderly, these pages, while we navigate “About nostalgia, the fact that “it used to be better””, It is clear that they are not intended to attract younger people. “In my waking hours I come across many fake old photographs, montages comparing fake couples at their wedding fifty years later, or even many fake images of birthday parties or crafts”lists the administrator, who goes through Facebook pages with quotes, sayings and other anniversaries to feed, not without humor, her account.
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However, these spaces that share poor quality content sometimes accumulate several tens of thousands, or even several hundred thousand subscribers. Its creators also manage discussion groups that can gather more than a million subscribers.
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