AI-generated videos and pictures are destroying one of the largest and most enduring sources of joy and compassion on the internet: animals. Whether the imagery features sailors rescuing a polar bear, baby cows separated from their mothers, or a lost pet that was miraculously found, many people have reached the point where they can’t take the creatures on their feeds at face value anymore. The explosion of deepfakes and AI slop over the past few years has led to widespread frustration among viewers, creators, and organizations that support animals, forcing everyone to hunt in the pixels for glitches or other telltale signs of AI.
Mibbby Butler was overjoyed one day in April when she received a text message that her lost cat, Brooklyn, had supposedly been found. Her roommate’s boyfriend had allegedly taken the cat and dumped him 30 minutes away in the Los Angeles suburbs the day prior. Butler quickly posted a missing poster on social media, and she was driving around with her roommate searching for Brooklyn when a stranger sent her a photo. In it, he is sitting on a kitchen counter while being embraced by a girl. Butler sensed she was being scammed and began looking closer at the photo. Brooklyn was posing the same way as he had in the picture Butler used for the missing poster. In both images, a Torani syrup bottle and a microwave can be seen in the background, except in the new photo, the label text was garbled, a classic sign that it was AI-generated. A disheartened Butler didn’t pay up. Four months later, Brooklyn is still missing.
Real, evocative images often pull on viewers’ heartstrings and are an important way for conservation and welfare projects to attract donations. But for the owners of AI slop accounts, synthetic imagery can be a convenient path to collecting likes and ad revenue. Since fakes are much cheaper to produce, they appear to be drowning out real clips in social feeds and search results, says Oscar Horta, a philosopher and leading animal activist who recently helped direct a short film on how AI could affect wildlife.
Source: wired
