Are You a “Grandmother,” a “Grandchild,” or the Unseen Middle Generation?
A recent Saturday Night Live (SNL) sketch made me think about the various ways the legal industry is responding to generative AI and where law librarians fit into the conversation. The sketch opens on Sunnyside Senior Home, where four grandchildren are visiting their grandmother for Thanksgiving. The grandchildren have a special surprise for their grandmother. They had a box of her old photos scanned into “Old-Time Photos Brought to Life,” an app that uses AI to analyze photos and makes the people and objects in the photos move and interact based on how the AI assumes they’ll move and act. Being an SNL sketch, you can imagine the AI’s assumptions are absurd and comical. The first picture of the grandmother’s father is mundane enough. The photo is shown “coming to life” by having the father smile and wave while a Ferris wheel moves normally in the background. From there things get more absurd. In one photo the father picks up the family dog Sadie, which is just a dog torso with two wagging tails, and puts it on a charcoal grill. The grandmother has a very natural reaction of horror and asks, “Why did the computer do that to Sadie?!”, to which one of her granddaughters defends the AI saying that there was probably too much happening in the picture and the AI got confused. The sketch continues with more photos “coming to life” in more and more absurd ways. The grandmother continues to respond with horror and confusion, and the grandchildren continue to defend the AI saying things like “Sometimes the AI is weird.” At one point the grandmother asks, “but why?!” as the AI creates more absurdity based on assumptions and is told “not to worry about it.” When they finally get to the last photo, the grandmother says “Maybe we don’t bring this one to life. It’s just so nice the way it is” but one of her grandsons says it cost him ten credits so they’re going to go ahead. As expected, even more absurdity ensues, leaving the grandmother to say she’s had enough of the photos. Her grandchildren say that they wanted to do something special for her and she tells them that just visiting her was something special.