The rise of generative AI videos featuring idealized, AI-generated teens reminiscing about the ’80s and ’90s isn’t just strange—it’s a symptom of a deeper cultural and technological shift. These clips, often set to nostalgic music and shot in dreamy, sun-drenched visuals, present a sanitized, hyper-idealized past where everyone is young, white, and effortlessly cool. The content thrives on a kind of manufactured nostalgia that’s less about memory and more about fantasy—a fantasy built on the assumption that the past was simpler, better, and more beautiful than the present. What’s particularly telling is who these videos are really for. They’re not made for people who lived through those decades and remember their complexities, inequalities, and anxieties. Instead, they’re aimed at younger audiences—Zoomers and Gen Alpha—who have no real experience of the past and are thus more likely to accept AI’s glossy, anachronistic reimagining as truth. The videos are not about history. They’re about aesthetic, mood, and the illusion of connection. They play on a yearning for a time that never really existed, one where life was carefree and everyone looked like a magazine cover. The absurdity reaches new heights with deepfakes of figures like Fred Rogers rapping with Tupac, flirting with Marilyn Monroe, or showing off a gun collection. These aren’t just bad videos—they’re offensive in their disregard for context, history, and dignity. They reduce iconic figures to punchlines, turning serious, complex people into cartoonish avatars of a bygone era. The fact that most of these videos are watermarked with OpenAI’s Sora model only underscores their artificiality. They’re not art. They’re experiments in virality. OpenAI and other AI companies are clearly using this content to promote their tools. The Sora app is designed to be simple—type a prompt, get a video. But the results are rarely original. Instead, they’re formulaic, repetitive, and often built on tired tropes: celebrities in absurd situations, animals in human roles, or dead icons doing something scandalous. The same prompts get recycled over and over: “What if a famous person was pulled over for drunk driving?” “What if a historical figure had a modern job?” The creativity is not in the output—it’s in the platform’s ability to generate it at scale. This isn’t democratization of art. It’s the industrialization of imagination. The promise of AI as a tool for creative liberation has been replaced by a system that rewards conformity, repetition, and shock value. The real winners aren’t the users or the artists. They’re the companies that profit from attention, ad views, and the illusion of innovation. And yet, people keep watching. Not because the content is good, but because it’s familiar, fast, and easy. It’s brainrot made visual. The humor, if there is any, only works if you already know the reference. Without that context, the jokes fall flat—or worse, they become offensive. A video of Stephen Hawking in a wheelchair joking about his condition isn’t funny. It’s disrespectful. A video of Fred Rogers being a sexual predator isn’t clever. It’s grotesque. The real question isn’t whether this content is good. It’s who it’s for, and what it says about us. If the only art we can create with AI is a loop of the same tired, shallow ideas, then we’re not advancing. We’re regressing. The future of entertainment shouldn’t be defined by how many times a dead celebrity can be made to do something ridiculous. It should be about meaning, depth, and originality. For now, the Sora app and its ilk are just a flash in the pan—content designed to look impressive, not to endure. The hype will fade. The novelty will wear off. And when it does, we’ll be left with a mountain of AI-generated slop, no better than the worst of internet culture, and no closer to the meaningful art we were promised.