AI Creates 'University Professor' to Handle Parents' Marriage Pressure, Gains 200,000 Followers in One Month

The challenge of intergenerational communication was ultimately "solved" by an expert who doesn't exist.

A WeChat public account called "Lao Zhao Talks Sense," created by a netizen in Chongqing, has gone unexpectedly viral. The account focuses on intergenerational topics such as marriage pressure, parent-child communication, and spending philosophies. Within just over a month of launch, it has amassed over 200,000 followers, with multiple articles exceeding 100,000 reads.

It all started this past Spring Festival. Faced with a steady stream of marriage-urging articles forwarded by his parents, the netizen chose not to push back directly. Instead, he used AI to create a fictional expert persona labeled as a "university professor" and, mimicking the authoritative tone and writing style his parents were accustomed to trusting, wrote articles and produced videos advising parents to let go and stop pressuring their children into marriage — then shared them back to his parents.

The core logic of this strategy is to sidestep direct confrontation and deliver the message children want to convey through channels and formats their parents already trust. After the account went viral, large numbers of netizens spontaneously built out "Lao Zhao's" backstory in the comments — publishing over a dozen SCI papers, dedicating 30 years to parent-child relationship research — making this fictional persona feel increasingly credible.

Psychology experts have labeled this approach "fighting fire with fire," noting that it precisely exploits parents' innate trust in authority figures while also serving as a collective emotional outlet for younger generations. Objectively speaking, the very fact that this phenomenon went viral speaks to how widespread the underlying problem is.

However, the same experts also pointed out the limitations of this approach: parents are placing their trust in a fictional expert, not in their own children. Over time, this could widen the gap between them further; and if the truth comes out, it may actually inflame tensions instead. From a communication design perspective, "Lao Zhao" addresses the surface-level issue of how information is delivered — not the structural problems in the parent-child relationship itself.

The experts' advice: a fictional expert can only defuse a momentary difficulty. It is face-to-face, warmth-filled daily companionship that serves as the true anchor of the parent-child bond.