We had a teenager over for New Year’s Eve, and one of his biggest hobby is to explain to me and my husband (“boomers” as he calls us even though we are millenials) what terminally online kids do these days; which words and memes and emoji are still in use. And this is how my final conversation of the year 2024 with came to be about the distracted boyfriend meme (which the teenager finds totally boomer).

I remembered then, that I had read on the internet a while ago (turned out to be 2018 haha, when the teenager was 10) that there is a Charlie Chaplin version of this meme (watch the whole film Pay Day that this is from on YouTube)

It is of course not said that the mem creators were ripping off Charlie Chaplin here, since people on Twitter came up with several older paintings and even a tapestry with similar images. But what struck me was what I said next, without even really thinking about it.

I said “I am happy I saw that meme before AI, because now I wouldn’t be sure of it was real”. Even if I could have found the whole movie the still comes from, that too would have been very easy to create with AI nowadays, and it would have costs me a lot of time to dive in. I am pretty sure that in 2018 I did not give a second thought to it, I just saw the image and could realistically assume it to be real.

I can’t bear to think of the extra work that we now all to carry out when sharing picture or video or audio, or the fact that people might refrain from sharing funny things for fear of fake stuff.

Ow the internet we have lost!!