Introduction
Boomers. AI Slop. A match made in heaven. Like moths to a flame or toddlers to Cocomelon. Whether it’s Grandpa sharing cats making dumplings on Facebook or your uncle reposting Trump Jesus on Twitter, I’m sure there’s some person overdue for a colonoscopy in your life who has taken a strong liking to the mass-produced synthetic content we call “AI slop”.
It feels like Gen Z has been outwardly hostile to this content, so what’s so different about Gen X and older? Is it the asbestos? Did it finally get to their brains?
Maybe. But I think there’s something more fundamental happening here. Something rooted deep in the psyche of the aging mind, and something with profound implications for the future of our society as a whole
Caveats
Before talking about why boomers use AI to such a greater extent than younger people, it’s important to address the elephant in the room, in that that statement is just blatantly wrong.
A 2025 study by Pew Research found that 64% of U.S. teens, nearly two-thirds, have used an AI chatbot in some capacity, and 38% have used it to create media. Moreover, roughly 53% of young adults report using AI at least once per day, compared to the 43% reported by people over 50 and 30% by people over 65.
So, by the numbers, it seems like we’ve actually got it all wrong; young people are the ones engaging with AI more often. The old folks are just waiting for this fad to pass, unfazed by the newfangled technobabble these whippersnappers are prattling on about.
But we know that’s not true. I have receipts in the form of hundreds of videos of animated stuffed animals from my grandma that prove otherwise.
And this is where an important distinction between active engagement and passive engagement has to be made. Because, while yes, the raw percentage of people who create with AI, who actually send prompts to Claude or Gemini, might be skewed towards a younger demographic, these studies don’t consider passive engagement. I.e., reposting something that’s already been made. After it’s been made and enters the wild west of social media, AI-generated media assimilates itself into the rest of the platform’s content, so you can’t exactly quantify how much boomers are interacting with synthetic posts rather than something real.
But a simple search online is all you need to realize that the consumption of slop is something predominantly skewed towards two ends of the age demographic spectrum: babies, and baby boomers.
With kids, I’m just going to chalk it up to pretty colors and an undeveloped mental model of what media should look like. But seniors are a different story. These are people with decades more life experience than the youngins; what makes them more inclined to engage with robotic, low-quality, mass-produced content? What motivates them to gobble the slop?
The Motivation to Consume AI Slop
One obvious reason is that they just don’t know that it isn’t real. I’ve heard some theories online that support this. One idea is that older people just aren’t as familiar with content on the internet. Young people have a, frankly concerning, amount of referential data to work with when evaluating if a post is AI or not. We have a knowledge base of hundreds of hours of screen time per month, and the brain rot to prove it. A lot of boomers have outright avoided adopting new tech like Smart TVs, and use platforms like YouTube to watch normal television instead of what we would usually consider “Internet Videos”.
So when you bring AI into the picture, it’s hard to make sense of it. To them, it might be in the same vein as CGI or even just fancy video editing. When we see these videos, we know something is off. There’s an “uncanny valley” kind of effect. But the uncanny valley only happens if you know what a human should look like, and in the case of AI, it only happens if you know what real content should look like.
That’s one theory. Another interesting one I came across is one I’m going to call “trust inertia”. Essentially, these are people who grew up in a time of institutionalized media. Anything in the paper, anything on the TV, was monitored, controlled, and most importantly: human-generated. Networks made sure that misinformation had consequences, and synthetic content wasn’t even possible with the available technology.
And this frame of mind. Of thinking everything presented to you is true, while flawed even back in the 1900s, is flat-out incorrect in the 21st century. Misinformation is the dominant force online, and digital natives have learned to take everything with a massive grain of salt. However, media literacy is a skill–one boomers haven’t developed, and thus makes them a bigger target for the slop farms.
But is that just it? They just don’t know any better? Oh poor old nana, can’t tell if the shrimp Jesus is real or not.
That may definitely be a piece of the puzzle, and some studies do support it. But other studies actually suggest that old people have very similar misidentification rates when it comes to artificially generated content, sometimes with even higher rates of false positives, meaning they assumed a real image was actually AI.
But if boomers aren’t particularly ignorant of the slop, why does it seem like they’re the majority demographic consuming and resharing it?
It’s because they’re the ones engaging with it more often. Younger people, when they see slop, they generally scroll past and try to wipe it from their memory. But there’s something about this content that makes older folks want to engage with it, which in turn encourages the algorithm to show similar content, which they continue to engage with, and it becomes a positively reinforcing feedback loop that outputs to the DMs of any poor souls in their WhatsApp contacts list.
Some innate characteristic of the media itself engages older people in a way that it doesn’t for millennials and younger. But we’re all seeing the same slop, so why do they see it differently?
There’s a psychological principle known as the socioemotional-selectivity theory, which essentially describes how the motivations that drive people’s behaviors and actions change as they age. As you get older, your time horizon shrinks. You start to realize that there’s not a lot of runway left on the track, and you shift your goals to be more focused on immediate emotional gratification, rather than developing your knowledge and improving life in the future.
In terms of technology, this idea of emotional selectivity was seen in smartphone usage. One study found that older adults prioritized the emotional value of phone apps over the actual functionality, when compared to the general population.
In addition to this change in goal motivation, aging can literally change the way you feel about good and bad things. Described as the “positivity effect”, older adults have similar responses to positive stimuli when compared to young people, but have a blunted perception of negative stimuli. When presented with a negative experience, older people have less activation in their amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex: the brain regions responsible for anxiety, stress, and some emotional regulation. This is also why the overwhelming majority of “doomers” are young adults.
So what does this have to do with dancing cats on Facebook?
Well, you can’t deny that a lot of AI videos are emotionally impactful. You’ve got content ranging from depictions of religious figures, to, genuinely disturbing and jarring health animations, to videos so bright and colorful they put cocomelon to shame.
And because of their reduced amygdaloid activation, boomers are less likely to perceive the flaws and negatives of the content. Who cares if Jesus has the wrong number of fingers? The second coming has begun, it’s a miracle!
Moreover, one study found that AI-generated content significantly improved older adults’ short-term mood and elicited positive feelings of happiness and nostalgia.
The unnaturally sentimental and positively valenced nature of these stimuli, paired with the elderly inclination to ignore imperfections, make them particularly effective in reaching the boomers.
These posts may not tug at your heartstrings, but to a generation predisposed to preferentially viewing emotionally stimulating content and not yet desensitized to the internet? It’s like giving candy to a newborn baby.
So that’s, at least part of the reason, why boomers like AI-generated content so much. Slop is literally more impactful to a senior citizen’s brain than it is to a younger person.
We did it Watson! We cracked the case, now let’s go block grandma on Facebook.
But alas, there’s still one more piece of the puzzle to be solved.
Consumption is only one half of the story; what about creation?
The Motivation to Create AI Slop
It feels like the older demographic are the ones predominantly using AI to publicly create and share synthetic media. I know I said earlier that it’s actually young people who primarily use AI, but from personal experience and reading others’ experiences online, it seems like Gen X and above have a tendency to use these generative models in a social context. Sure, Gen Z and millennials might be the ones dominating usage for themselves or in work and school, but they aren’t the ones making comics about their lives and sharing it with friends and family.
Why is this? It’s not like we say that they don’t know what they’re doing again; they’re the ones putting in the prompt. What makes AI-generated media so appealing that, in some cases, they’re willing to go as far as to leave their digital comfort zone in order to make a funny picture?
Once again, it comes back to psychology and goal motivation.
There’s a framework called the “self-determination theory”, that suggests three fundamental psychological needs for all humans: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. And creating and sharing AI slop is surprisingly effective at fulfilling these needs.
Starting with autonomy. It’s fairly simple: AI gives complete power over the end product. Anything AI generated is essentially infinitely customizable. The creator can execute their will, without having to sacrifice control to any other person or institution.
(For the sake of simplicity, I’m ignoring the inherent guardrails and biases that prevent true freedom in artificial intelligence models)
Next, relatedness. Because AI is so customizable, it can be made relatable. You can insert yourself, friends, family, everyone and everything you love into an AI-generated image with just a simple prompt. When you share these with others, it builds social connection. Just like how you or I might bond over a meme about AI slop, the slop itself enables boomers, who don’t browse social media for memes, to bond similarly.
But, for the most part, this could be said for younger people too. AI also gives young people a self of autonomy and relatedness, so why is it more attractive to the older generation?
Competence.
These are adults who are just living in a world that digital natives were born in. AI isn’t a huge deal to the generation with vast knowledge and access to Photoshop, Canva, online meme templates, and other creative digital tools, but it is to the people who were left behind when these platforms came to dominate.
More than being able to control the outcome, being able to use a seemingly incredibly powerful technological tool gives the older generation an unparalleled sense of digital competence.
In contrast, these tools likely do the exact opposite for younger people. Even if we aren’t all artists, to some extent we have a level of competence when it comes to creating digital media. Image manipulation, meme making, video editing; all basic skills for the generate born with a phone in their hands. So when we see content that lacks any of the artistic integrity, soul, or passion that we’re used to seeing and creating, it’s insulting. It actively devalues our own competence.
Slop might universally give a sense of autonomy and relatedness, but it’s dichotomous in terms of giving feelings of competence.
Which is why it seems like the boomers are so much more excited to share their novel Nano Banana creations with the world.
And honestly, is that so wrong? Sure, it can be annoying and eye-roll inducing, and sure, AI might be a bit harmful to the environment, but on the small scale of a relatable family meme here and there? How bad would it be to let grandpa enjoy the newfound accessibility of this technology?
Well…
The Dangers of Slop
While the simple creations that the boomers make and share with friends and family might not be harmful, the sheer accessibility of these tools, and the older generation’s vulnerability to them, may be.
As generative AI becomes easier to use, more powerful, and more widespread, the rates of its use in deception and scams can only increase, and this is particularly dangerous for the population predisposed to enjoying synthetic content.
This is most apparent in Facebook scams. Interacting with any form of artificial media on social media platforms, like I mentioned earlier, has a reinforcement effect, where you’re more likely to see additional AI slop in your feed moving forward.
This is all fun and games when it’s silly cat videos and laughing babies, but it gets a lot less funny when scammers try to use AI content to attract attention, feign credibility, and extract personal information and sometimes even money from the poor souls who happen to come across it in their feed.
Slop is a very sticky spiderweb that baits and traps people not familiar with the dangers of the internet, weaved by scum of the earth who want nothing less than to scam the elderly and the unfortunate. Their trust inertia is turned against them, leading to saddening outcomes.
And this is not even to mention the other, non-slop-related scams that AI has made so much easier. Seemingly professional chatbots, voice cloning, facial deepfakes–these are all scams that affect not only the boomers, but quite frankly, us too.
Conclusion
Boomers don’t have as deep of an understanding of modern media as the younger generation, are more likely to trust what pops up on their feed, and simply have a cognitive predisposition to the emotionally charged nature of AI slop. Synthetic content in social media algorithms has a self-reinforcing feedback loop, putting these photos and videos predominantly in front of elderly eyes.
Furthermore, older adults are more inclined to share AI-generated content because it fulfills the essential human desires for autonomy, social relatedness, and most importantly: competency. In contrast to the youngins, who perceive AI as a competency threat and an insult to creativity, older folk perceive it as more of a competency enhancement.
Although the “sloppening” might seem to be merely annoying from the surface, the sinister nature of AI-generated media’s power on society’s most vulnerable reveals a darker reality.
And honestly? It’s coming for us too.