This week I watched a video of an attractive woman strutting down a street in slow motion. At her side was a muscular, humanoid crocodile more than twice her height, wearing a suit and swaggering on his hind legs.
The video was hypnotic, strangely beautiful and, at least to someone of my generation, very clearly made by Artificial Intelligence (AIAI*_).
Most extraordinary of all, though, wasn't the content – but the comments the footage attracted. 'Isn't it dangerous to have that as a pet?' scoffed one awestruck user. 'Dressing animals up in human clothes is just cruel,' insisted another. Summarising the confusion was one bemused person who asked: 'Is this real?'
I didn't need to click on the profile pictures of those commenters to know that they almost certainly remembered pagers, dial-up mobiles and fax machines.
Yes, they were all Boomers: born between 1946 and 1964 when AI was only a science-fiction premise. The sudden deluge of this computer-generated content has left them questioning the foundations of reality – and many are very, very confused.
Content such as the crocodile bodyguard is often dismissively referred to as 'AI slop'. This conjures images of pig food overflowing from troughs for hungry hogs to snort at – which feels like the perfect metaphor for the internet.
Nowadays, 'slop' is the name given to AI-generated pictures and videos, often poor-quality and widely shared on social media. It is becoming increasingly ubiquitous – and taking Boomers for fools.
Certain themes seem to do the rounds. There's 'pity slop', which often takes the form of distraught people sobbing over some heartbreaking situation.
A 50-year-old woman claiming to have 'no husband, no children' weeps as she blows out the candles on a birthday cake she baked herself. Or a young girl cries on a refugee boat as she cradles a cute puppy.
Then there's 'religious slop' – unearthed skeletons of supposed angels or images of Jesus carrying a giant prawn in the sea.
Or take 'celebrity slop': a fake image of billionaire Elon Musk comforting a sobbing Starbucks cashier who 'can't afford a gift' for her daughter – or last week's AI video of Jewish celebrities, including Scarlett Johansson, giving the middle finger to rapper Kanye West after he went on an anti-Semitic tirade on social media.
Some are completely bizarre: an old lady sitting in a shoe she supposedly knitted herself; a young boy carving an intricate monkey into a tree trunk; a baker creating a full-sized horse out of bread.
There's huge variety – but they all have one thing in common. They're catnip for clicks – especially from Boomers.
The over-60s are not responsible for creating this rubbish but they're still to blame. Because they can't stop clicking on it, they cause the slop to go viral. The more 'engagement', the more the algorithms spread the images widely.
Should we be surprised? This is the same demographic who, during email's heyday, would forward a chain to 12 people to avoid a 'curse' on their family or believe a message from a 'Nigerian prince' was genuine.
Even the over-50s have been pulled in – just look at the 53-year-old Frenchwoman who was convinced that Brad Pitt had fallen in love with her on social media but needed £700,000 to deal with 'cancer treatment'.
In time, perhaps this content will go the same way as spam mail. At one point it felt like email was going to become unusable because of all the junk, until new software caught up and began efficiently removing it.
However this won't happen any time soon if gullible Boomers keep sharing the slop – not helped by social media sites such as Facebook whose algorithms were last year found to be boosting these AI-generated posts.
It's easy for me as a technologically-literate millennial to scoff, but even I know how convincing some of this slop is. It's also improving at a terrifying rate – so much so that some images are increasingly indiscernible from real ones.
Just a few months ago, you could look at someone's hands in a picture and know if it was doctored because AI couldn't quite master four fingers and a thumb. But even this gauge is now outdated.
But while we can all excuse some confusion, what I don't understand is some Boomers' lack of context clues. If you see a video of an elephant that fits into someone's palm, an entire house made from aquariums or a skydiving camel, do you really need to ask if it's real?
Where are these Boomers' common sense filters? Do they weaken with your bones, stored somewhere in the cartilage of your hip joints? It's amazing that these images can be created at all – I certainly have no idea how it's done – but I don't need to understand the technology to know that a photo of chickens on Mars probably isn't real.
Even the most famous Boomer on the planet, 78-year-old Donald Trump, isn't immune. Last year, he shared AI-generated images of Taylor Swift fans endorsing him for US President – prompting the pop star to reveal she was a Democrat.
While there are all sorts of scary ramifications for AI, right now I'm focused on two things: the internet becoming flooded with this garbage and Boomers becoming desensitised to feats that are truly impressive.
No craft project will ever be as spectacular as the giant crocheted tank they saw online; no missing child as cute as the one with eyes twice the normal size. And how will they ever be amazed by a magic trick after being awed by the doctored video that showed two contestants on talent show Britain's Got Talent transform into flying swans?
I'm sure that one day, when my crow's feet deepen and my hair thins, I too will be discombobulated by some technological advancement.
Perhaps I'll chat on the phone for hours with a scammer who tells me he's a talking porpoise, or be tricked by a hologram of a non-existent celebrity.
When that happens I expect to be mercilessly mocked by Generation Alpha below me. But, until then, my message to all internet hogs is this: Stop chowing down this slop.