Text | Pacific Technology
"Do you know bean buns?"
At the moment when all industries are bombarded every day to be all in AI, when I heard my father, who is nearly 2 years old, rushing to the moment and recommending bean bags to himself, IDA was stunned for at least 0 seconds.
The AI wave has swept 2 years, from large models to application layers, from the early Wenxin Yiyan to the popular DeepSeek this year, it is undeniable that the improvement of AI on every cow and horse is palpable. However, there are very few young people who take the initiative to talk to the elderly in their families about AI.
Despite the overwhelming AI news, the digital divide still exists, and the gap between the grand narrative of AI technological breakthroughs and the perception of ordinary people, especially the sinking market and the elderly, is still difficult to bridge.
Technology 越底層,sensing 越滯後。
But now this AI revolution is building another parallel world — while tech elites are arguing about when AGI will arrive, Aunt Wang in the county town has learned how to grow flowers with Kimi and how to use DeepSeek to make carrot cakes......
They don't care how many "R's" there are in strawberry, and they won't make a big fuss about which number is 9.0 or 0.0, they are the silent majority in technological change, but they also constitute the most realistic landing picture of AI inclusiveness.
Ahri's parents are now DeepSeek's wild folk spokesperson.
What we think of as AI: checking information, writing code, drawing and making PPT;
Actual AI: Mr. Feng Shui, senior numerology expert, and the younger ones can also serve as tarot masters and astrologers.
I don't know which god first used DeepSeek to tell fortunes, but when Ahri returned to his hometown during the Spring Festival this year, he had already discovered that his parents and their friends had started to use AI fortune telling.
During the entire Spring Festival holiday when DeepSeek was brushed, to talk to parents about DeepSeek's performance in Chinese NLP tasks (such as reading comprehension, text generation), parents would only be empty-eyed, but if you told him that AI can tell fortunes, it would be "more in line with the physique of the elderly in China".
Unlike young people who will go to Xiaohongshu to search for corresponding instructions before using AI fortune telling, parents will only carefully type the date of birth of their children in the search box through word of mouth, and add a sentence "Help my son/daughter calculate the fortune and marriage." ”
Because of its small life circle and acquaintance network, the residents of the town have certain consumption concepts and behaviors such as conformity and acquaintance circle communication. There is no need for hundreds of millions of streams, and the popularization of AI in the county has its own communication network.
"My dad is gradually obsessed with it now, basically when Baidu uses it, and he also sees one and recommends one, so that the relatives in the family don't ask about the bean bag in advance if they have something to do." Xiao Yuan "complained" at PConline.
Also relying on the network of acquaintances to use AI is Nove's father, as a retired old teacher,Long before DeepSeek exploded, he had already used Kimi on the recommendation of his school teacher.
Now, there are 2 AI software lying in Nove's father's phone, one is Kimi and the other is a bean bag.
"He would use AI to write lesson plans, send the same question to two AIs, and then integrate it." Although he is also a teacher, Nove will know about the use of AI in work scenarios, and even recommended it by his father.
Source: Courtesy of the interviewee
When PConline asked why Dad used AI in addition to writing lesson plans, Nové said with a smile: "I will ask for the introduction of a certain car, and it will also be used to calculate the length of service, such as 'how old is it from a certain month to now'", and after saying that, Nove added that "counting the length of service is really easy to use!" ”
"Bean Bao Bean Bao, how many degrees is the weather today?"
AI applications can sink to the silver-haired population in the county, and it is not even like Douyin as a new product in the early days and has a long adaptation cycle, and the most important point is not the so-called evolution of thinking and reasoning ability that we often say, but minimalism.
At the recommendation of her son, Aunt Wang is now accustomed to using DeepSeek or Kimi to search for recipes. In fact, her son had recommended Xiaohongshu to Aunt Wang earlier, but for Aunt Wang, she didn't like to use it whether it was a traditional search software like Baidu, or Douyin and Xiaohongshu.
"A lot of software has pushes, ads, and pop-up messages, she is annoyed, and the older generation is most afraid of using these software is to accidentally click on the wrong pop-up and don't know where it goes."Aunt Wang's son said helplessly, "Especially the shake advertisement, my mother shook it by mistake several times." ”
Older people's acceptance of any new product of the Internet is lagging behind. For older people who are not familiar with technology, any form of advertising can leave them feeling helpless and confused.
At present, the UI design of most AI software is relatively simple, click on the APP is the search box, and there will be no Baidu kind of content information flow, this minimalist page reduces complex functions and steps, making it easier for the elderly to get started, and reducing the fear of the elderly about new technologies.
"Compared with teaching them to use Xiaohongshu before, now teaching them to use AI basically has no acceptance cycle."
As an Internet migrant worker, he has been dealing with AI since its first outbreak, but he has never discussed any AI-related issues with his parents before. The first time he found out that his father started to use AI was during a family trip during the Spring Festival, he heard his father skillfully ask: "Doubao Doubao, what are the attractions around here?" ”
He was surprised to find that AI had infiltrated his parents' daily lives.
IDA's father only learned about the bean bag after swiping an advertisement on Douyin, and when it comes to the reason why his parents began to rely on AI, IDA believes,Voice questioning and voice playback are important points.
Source: Bean buns
His father can't type in pinyin, so being able to directly "hold down and speak" undoubtedly directly lowers the threshold for him to use AI.
Maybe it's because I'm used to using Xiao Ai's classmates to turn on TV at home, before IDA's father uses bean bags, he will habitually shout a sentence "Bean Bao Bean Bao", because he usually likes to travel very much, and now IDA's father does travel strategies The steps are often: before you go, you should use Douyin to search for attractions, and when you arrive at the destination, you will ask what is delicious and fun near Doubao.
Source: Courtesy of the interviewee
It is worth noting that although the voice assistant of mobile phones has been popularized for a long time, when accessing PConline, it was found that most parents did not have the habit of using Siri or Xiaoai to ask questions.
Ida's father would even use bean bags to ask about the weather today. "Sometimes it's hard to call out voice assistants, maybe it feels like AI is still more intelligent?" Nove said.
Source: Courtesy of the interviewee
QuestMobile數據顯示，截止到2024年9月，銀髮人群月活躍用戶達到3.29億，每月人均使用時長為129小時，他們觸網的廣度和深度一直都在持續攀升。
In fact, since the development of AI applications, although the number of downloads has been rising, the usage time and opening frequency are still not ideal. This may have something to do with the fact that the largest user group of AI applications is young people, who are more used as efficiency tools in work scenarios than in rigid demand scenarios.
From this point of view,If you use AI as Baidu and have nothing to do with DeepSeek, why not be the most potential incremental group for AI applications.
At the CPPCC group discussion some time ago, Jin Dong, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and actor, responded to the fraud caused by AI face swapping. He said: "Some viewers who like my film and television dramas have been deceived very badly by the AI face-swapping video, which is very bad. Hopefully better rules can be established. ”
Time goes back to 60 years, when Grandma Huang, who was in her 0s, ran away from home in order to run away with "Jin Dong". She said that "Jin Dong" confessed to her all over the Internet, so she decided to "marry Jin Dong and live bravely once".
At that time, the scammers didn't even use AI, just a poster of Jin Dong that came out of Photoshop.
With the continuous development of AI technology, AI image generation, AI face swapping, and AI onomatopoeia are causing a new round of AI content governance problems. During last year's National Day, Lei Jun's onomatopoeia synthesized by AI swept Douyin, and some netizens ridiculed, "On the seventh day of the National Day, I was chased and scolded by 'Lei Jun' for eight days." ”
Perhaps for young people who are already familiar with AI routines, they can also know that it is fake between jokes. But for the elderly who usually like to share some health tips in the family group, it is too difficult to distinguish the authenticity of AI.
Recently, the fake grandchildren generated in batches with AI have become the cyber nipple fun of many grandmothers.
According to Vista's report, a young netizen went home to visit the elderly during the Chinese New Year and found that his grandmother was smiling at a group of chubby children wearing red belly pockets and small cotton jackets on her mobile phone.
After playing the short 5-second video repeatedly for an hour, every time the little chubby child in the mobile phone shouts "grandma", grandma will enthusiastically reply with "Hey! ”
We looked at the fake video, but we succeeded in coaxing the old man to smile. This sense of disconnection is not accidental, and there will always be a cognitive "time difference" in the technological revolution.
Just like in the early days of the electric revolution, ordinary people only saw electric lights replacing kerosene lamps, but they didn't realize that the power grid and electric motors were reshaping the entire industrial production chain - the technological revolution always started to subvert from the bottom, and the public could only touch the light on the surface. The same is true of today's large-scale model competition: the competition for parameters and computing power is like "power grid construction", and the "electric lights" (such as voice assistants) that ordinary people can perceive are only the end of the technological spillover effect.
The elderly group is the most typical contradiction in this change: they are not only passive recipients trapped in the "terminal perception layer", but also active participants in the sinking of technology. When parents in county towns learn AI on their own, they seem to be crossing the digital divide, but in fact they are more likely to fall into the more insidious cognitive trap of being unable to tell what is true and what is fake garbage.
That's the real red flag. The exponential rise in the productivity of AI horror and the increasing difficulty of distinguishing AI-generated content with the naked eye blurs the virtual and the real, coupled with the systemic lack of intergenerational care, will make it easier for the elderly to be exploited by those with good intentions and fall for scams.