One of my favorite birthday traditions is going to youtube and finding the most recently uploaded Happy Birthday video and sending it to a friend.

Generally it’s of a bunch of Pakistani kids singing horribly. Or maybe grandparents from nepal saying something I don’t understand. They’ll usually have somewhere between 0 and 2 views.

There is something really uncomfortably earnest about them, they feel personal, intimate. Like you’re peeking into their living rooms during an actual honest to goodness birthday party.  

Those videos felt like a secret part of the internet where things were not designed for mass consumption and fame. A birthday video on Tiktok or even Youtube shorts feels like it’s an attempt at gaining clout. Which is stupid. These videos are things of utility, things of kindness. People just want to say happy birthday to someone they love, and the internet’s how you do that nowadays, I guess. 

Its existence on the internet feels begrudging. I don’t believe anyone who made any one of those videos expected them to be seen by anybody but the person who’s birthday it was. The people I send it to are also celebrating, after all. 

Abby went to look for just such a video to send her sister tonight and found them replaced with AI. Where once there were dozens of strangely honest videos designed for audiences of one or two, now there are countless of automatically churned out birthday songs addressed to every name imaginable by ChatGPT. 

At least that’s what we saw when we searched on Abby’s phone. Searching now on my computer it’s that familiar old number: countless disturbingly familiar recordings by people being people on the internet, whatever that means.

My comfort at their continued existence grapples with my discomfort with the fact that Abby’s results are so different.