Boomers love making AI images of their grandkids. Their millennial children see a privacy nightmare.

When Ben Metcalfe recently visited his grandparents, he was greeted by an AI-generated caricature of one of their family photos hanging on the kitchen wall. "I understand that there was good intention behind doing it," says Metcalfe, a Gen Zer who works in AI governance. "At the same time, it's a major privacy concern."

Jen, a 32-year-old mom, tells me that last Christmas her mom texted her a series of adorable images: Jen's two toddlers sitting in Santa's lap, then riding the Polar Express. Their cheeks were fuller than she knew them to be, their eyes glossier, the lighting pristine — all thanks to Grok, xAI's chatbot. "It's so cute. And I want to love it," she tells me. But it was too unsettling to embrace.

Jen, whose name has been changed to avoid sparking more family drama, says she's read news about Grok generating sexual abuse material, and worries about how the bot could use her children's faces in the future.

It's not just her mom. For Mother's Day, a friend sent her a coloring sheet with her kids' faces, and her brother-in-law used AI to add one of her kids to a family photo who had been covered by a stroller, napping, when it was taken, she says. Everyone means well, Jen says, but they're walking blindly into a big risk, and the technology is so new, she isn't even sure what boundaries are best to set around how loved ones use her children's images with AI. "We all aren't educated enough about what AI companies are doing with our content," she says.

In one corner are growing ranks of lawmakers calling for kids to be booted from social media, and parents concerned about data privacy opting to share less with AI companies and social media platforms. Europe is considering regulations that would limit chatbot and AI companion access to those younger than 15.

In the other corner are parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends who are uploading millions of images of kids into AI generators, delighting at the uncanny output, and sharing them far and wide. They use AI to make custom gags, generating portraits of the family, sending eCards and making toys, T-shirts, tchotchkes, and children's books through websites that encourage and profit from this very oversharing, making personalization a selling point. To some, it's endearing; to others, a privacy nightmare that may come with just a quick laugh, but long-term implications that aren't fully r

The more people see photos like this on social media, the more it's normalized, says Metcalfe. "It's this effect of, well if they're doing it, then we can do it as well, and then it becomes a chain reaction of everyone else is kind of doing it."

We're losing the tenuous grasp over our own images. And for some, their families are the first ones to give that control away.

The sites once exclusive to college-enrolled Millennials have become family trees. Six generations cram onto social media now, from the Silent Generation (not so silent on Facebook) to Gen Alpha. Different generations have varying consensus about what the point of social platforms even is anymore: Is AI-generated imagery the playground of the future, is it cringe, or can it lead images to be used for something far more nefarious?

Some parents of young children have pushed back against family members posting their kids for years. AI has raised the stakes, as social media sites have come under fire for misuse of young people's images in AI generators. xAI faces a lawsuit brought by a woman who is a child sexual abuse survivor and alleges Grok created new deepfake exploitive images of her after real images of her abuse were uploaded. xAI did not respond to a request for comment, but Elon Musk has called the exploitation of children on X "priority #1" when he bought the platform in 2022, and xAI has sued users who are faci

The differences in how generations perceive social media stems from their own relationship to privacy and context collapse, rather than their technical ability, says Paromita Pain, a professor of global media at the University of Nevada, Reno. Posting a photo to show your friends your new grandson or niece can lead to unintended consequences that are hard to conceptualize when presented with the ease of social media photo sharing. As Baby Boomers grew up, there was less emphasis on privacy because, aside from a few celebrities and politicians, privacy was the default.

Millennials saw the switch from an anonymous internet with AOL chatrooms to the very on-the-record days of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. They and now Gen Z have grown to see the evolution of cancel culture. Those experiences that influence how Millennials and Zoomers want to use the internet can confound their Boomer parents.