Check on your local Unc. They are likely confused by seeing their nephew giving postgame quotes on getting old in the NBA.
Let them know it’s just the newest TikTok brain rot—an AI-generated NBA press conference where a pixel-perfect player, sometimes real, sometimes historical, leans into the mic and sighs: “I’m getting old.” Cue a timeline reel from draft to today, with someone who looks like an NPC eulogizing their “NBA career.”
View this post on Instagram
“
The clips are most often scored to “Good Old Days“ by Macklemore featuring Kesha, equally soulless syrup that peddles nostalgia. The video fades between fake career highlights while the player’s AI “voice” cracks under reflection.
It’s called the Sora “I’m Getting Old” edit, and it’s the newest remix of AI simulation that’s taking over your For You Page. When exactly is that asteroid arriving?
From Steph to Sora
Like most memes, this one connects to a real-world origin story.
It’s inspired by a postgame interview with Steph Curry during the 2024–25 season. After dropping 46 points, he smiled wearily and said, “Man, I’m getting old,” brushing sweat from his forehead.
That offhand remark has become AI shlock. Fans clipped it, chopped it, screwed it and slowed it down with self-aggrandizement. But once OpenAI’s Sora, the video generation model, entered the public beta, the internet did what it does best: dumbed it down, down, down.
Anyone can feed Sora 2 a prompt like “Generate a 4K press conference of me retiring from the NBA, age 37, wearing a vintage Heat jersey, with confetti falling”—and the result feels eerily real, except for the “Heat championship” part.
From there, users began inserting themselves, historical figures, or even fictional characters into the edit format. Americans under 30 might not know the years of Abe Lincoln’s administration or any legislation he passed, but best believe, they’ll use his likeness for clout.
It’s absurd, uncanny and shows the line of singularity between the kids and the uncs.
How It Works
To understand the “I’m getting old” trend, you must familiarize yourself with another AI app, this time it’s Sora 2, OpenAI’s latest video generator.
This is a simulation engine. It lets you Photoshop reality.
The template: A reflective close-up → a reporter’s question → a humble answer → grainy highlight reel → title card that reads “The Good Old Days.”
Here’s how it happens: You record a short clip of yourself talking, or just feed the app a few selfies and voice lines. Sora’s new “Cameo” feature builds a high-fidelity likeness with face, voice and micro-expressions that can be dropped into any generated scene. From there, a single prompt does the rest.
View this post on Instagram
“
Seconds later, you’re staring at an eerily real version of yourself, tears pixelated under soft stadium lighting, with Macklemore reminiscing about something that never existed.
The most unsettling part of Sora 2 is the audio. The app moves your mouth and matches tone, breath and even reverb to the generated room. The player in the video sounds like you, looks like you and blinks at the right moment, as if AI learned how to remember.
AI Nostalgia?
Younger Americans don’t flinch at AI’s artifice. Kids under 21 were raised inside it. What older heads call “uncanny,” youngbloods call “content.” For those raised on social media, the line between real and rendered was never there to begin with.
Obviously, there’s appeal. The strange power of AI-generated nostalgia lets us grieve lives we never experienced.
Media theorist Mark Fisher once described hauntology—the idea that culture is haunted by lost futures. The Sora edits are hauntological sports cinema: highlight reels from Hall of Fame careers that never existed, narrated by players who didn’t exist.
The “I’m getting old” line hits because it sounds like what every athlete eventually says when they’re past their prime. It’s a universal sports truth, along with “father time is undefeated.” When spoken by an AI double, it becomes something else we don’t quite have context for yet.
We know it’s fake. We just don’t care.
The Aura of the Unreal
The inspiration behind The Matrixand The Truman Show, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call AI revisionist history simulacra. Or, copies without originals. You can create a basketball career conjured entirely from coding.
In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard wrote that the image “no longer even hides the truth—it hides that there is none.” The “I’m getting old” edits mimic authenticity without ever touching it. It’s a commodification of illusion.
There’s rebellion in that. Like the 6-7 meme before it, the “I’m getting old” trend folds parody into performance. In the age of “fake news,” Baudrillard might say the Sora filter can even replace ESPN or other frameworks of media authority. In the future, could simulation no longer be an escape from reality but its continuation?
When the Bit Dies
Every meme has its expiration date. And Sora’s is right around the corner. Once big brands start using Sora edits to announce product drops like, “We’re getting old…so we made a new flavor of Gatorade,” it’ll die.
The same way “6-7” lost its punch when adults said it unironically, “I’m getting old” will too.
In its infancy, we’re still enjoying the absurdity. These fake retirements remind us of why we watch sports in the first place. Sports can be the closest a human gets to cinema. Ignore the old heads. Enjoy it while it lasts. Make your own fake legacy video. Drop your AI championship montage. Because one day, when Sora has moved on, you’ll look back on these clips and think: We were really onto something.
Even if none of it was real.
Discover more from 6up.net
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.