AI Animal Videos Are Ruining One Of The Internet’s Last Good Things

Recently, while picking up a banh mi in my neighborhood, I found myself transfixed by a TV in the restaurant showing what I assumed was a nature documentary. At first the footage soothed: Gentle humpback whales sailing through hazy blue waters and killer whales gliding in packs under glacial ice. But the longer I waited for my banh mi, which was not very long at all, the more unsettling the video became. When a fleet of eight or so orcas moved in uncanny alignment under ice that looked a little too crystalline, I realized the video was AI, a realization that felt first bleak but then reassuring for my ability to detect such things. I was re-unsettled when the video then cut to footage that looked absolutely real. It was another humpback gliding through murky, sun-drizzled sea, its grizzled jaw scarred and encrusted with barnacles. When I suggested this footage might be real, I got into an argument with my friend, who insisted the entire video was AI. Surely it couldn't be, because this whale looked real to me. The nature of my job means that friends and strangers will often show me videos of animals that stir in them feelings of awe, wonder, surprise, disgust, fear, loathing, or confusion. For years, this was a delight, a banquet of beautiful creatures personally curated for me. My Instagram DMs teemed with blue dragon sea slugs feasting on blue bottle jellyfish and the unreal, telescopic eyes of a strawberry conch. I loved learning about the new animals my friends had chanced upon: the female Boulenger's backpack frog, who carries her eggs on her back until they hatch into froglets, or the Yucatán casque-headed tree frog, whose bony head is large and almost like that of a duck. (Frogs starred in a lot of these videos for reasons that are unknown but pleasing to me, and a testament to the amphibians' universal good vibes.) I even appreciated the honorary creatures, such as the pulsing plasmodium of this slime mold, or this ceramic effigy vessel of a land crab. In the past few years, something shifted. At first the slop was sloppy. The animals had extra tentacles or anime eyes. They glitched as they moved. Sometimes they found themselves in surreal circumstances, such as in a video claiming to depict a giant squid being "cleaned and rescued" off the coast of California. But gradually, almost beyond my notice, the fake animals got more real. Their fur bristled. They scampered more naturally. The video quality got fuzzier, mimicking nature's often imperfect lighting conditions. But I was still able to spot them, or at least I thought I was. I began opening the links my friends sent me with an ambient dread, afraid of having to break the news that they'd been duped by AI, or afraid that I'd be duped, too.