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Mum, we need to talk about AI.
Your mum’s Instagram feed isn’t ‘social’ anymore. It’s engineered for engagement. Here’s how to explain AI, open the conversation, and not fall out over it.
The day my mum told me London Bridge was covered in a giant honey sculpture, I believed her.
Mostly because I’d already seen the post on Secret London’s Instagram and, embarrassingly, sent it to my partner with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for new bakeries and bank holidays. (The way we react to pictures of London’s newest hottest croissants exposes us as the basic millennials we are.)
In the image, Tower Bridge was lacquered in thick amber globs, a glossy, photorealistic marvel that made a certain corner of my brain whisper: Go now, before it melts.
It was, obviously (with hindsight), fake. As someone who works with AI every day, I should have clocked it sooner.
But the point is less my gullibility than the ease with which an image like that slips past your defences, because it’s beautiful, plausible, and therefore eminently shareable.
And now, helpfully, I can’t even find the original post, which only adds to the Mandela Effect haze that these things are so good at creating. I swear it was real, I just checked with my partner and he remembers it too.
