Representational image.

People can be very cruel. You’d think that it was just children being cruel to one another with the bullying and name calling and, sometimes even the beating up on the way to and from school, or even the washrooms. And one hopes that, as a person matures and the years go by, they see sense and become different people.

 When I was at school, I had a few bullies who would try to belittle me and one English girl, who seemed to be a born racist, actually said to me, in a chemistry class, that she hoped I’d burn myself on the Bunsen burner. Her actual words were, ‘I hope you burn yourself’.

Bullies target people for no apparent reason, but just because they can. But here’s the weird thing. Decades later, this same English girl contacted me on a friends’ website (called Friends Reunited, which later closed down) and sent a friend’s request which I accepted. She’d now become a nurse, presumably dressing those burn wounds that she hoped I would get in that chemistry class. But I never wrote to her to remind her of how horrid she was to me at school. I just accepted the friend’s request and forgot about it. Maybe she’d ‘grown up’?

 All this meanness is at schoolchildren level and we often put it down to ‘boys will be boys’ or ‘kids like to mess around’. They’re kids, after all.

 But what should one make of adults behaving in the same way, or even worse? I say this because when adults start doing nasty things to one another, it’s more than just words and the occasional beating up. Lives can be ruined or unpleasant and devastating memories can be rehashed.

 In England, back in 1992, a little 2-year-old boy named Jamie Bulger was abducted in a shopping mall by two ten-year-old boys. Security cameras showed the two boys taking him by the hand and walking away with him. Their intent was well thought out and very sinister. The little boy’s body was later discovered on rail tracks and it had been sliced in half. They did some very cruel things to him and then took his life. The mother was devastated and the whole nation was shocked. Now imagine this. Someone who wants to be ‘clever’ decided that they’d generate an AI image of little Jamie sending messages to his mother and posted it on social media. I mean, what is wrong with these people? Did they think that the mother would be happy to see her dead child speak as though he were still alive?

 Okay, many might argue that if smartphones had been around in 1992, the mother may have had videos of the little boy. That is true. But those videos would have been a memory of events at which she was actually present, either in front of the camera or behind. They would have been true memories and not something made up. Those AI images of Jamie speaking to his mother are neither true nor real. They are just rubbing salt in a mothers wound.

The images were, of course, taken down after the mother protested. But really, what was the intent behind this decision to create an AI image of a dead baby speaking? Was it malice or were they trying to make the mother feel good that her baby was speaking? From the grave?

It’s completely nuts and, quite frankly, very disrespectful and irresponsible.

 The AI image was not a mistake or an accident. Nor was a text message I received in the first week of January addressed to my late father, wishing him a Happy Birthday. Now this was a mistake and very distasteful. It was also very irresponsible. I was very annoyed and asked them what they thought they were doing sending birthday wishes to someone who passed away 10 years ago. They would have known he had passed. Unfortunately, they didn’t respond and just said it was an accident. But some accidents can have unpleasant consequences such as bringing back unpleasant memories of someone’s passing when they were extremely unwell. I was appalled and told them so.

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