It’s hard to describe the way your heart sinks when you realize that you’ve been fooled by an AI animal video for the first time. Instead of watching real videos of bunnies, debatably one of the cutest creatures on the world wide web, we’ve collectively been bamboozled by this viral video of rabbits on a trampoline. More than 180 million TikTok viewers saw this piece of media, featuring what appeared to be 6 wild rabbits softly jumping on a backyard trampoline. It’s very cute and totally innocuous. The rabbits take hesitant little steps, you can see their little tails… but at one point, you see one of the rabbits melt into another. If you aren’t paying attention, or if you’re just a casual viewer not looking for AI, you probably got fooled into thinking, “Aw, that’s so cute! This is what wild rabbits do when they see someone’s unguarded trampoline at 3 AM.” Videos like this ask the question: what does this mean for the future of cutesy animal videos online? And what is the real-life impact on animals who are affected by AI’s environmental toll?
Photo of AI-generated rabbits via WWLTV
In an investigation into the rabbit video, WWLTV asked experts why people were fooled by this particular video. Part of the reason is that it’s styled to look like surveillance footage, which people are primed to take at face value. There’s been a huge influx of Ring camera footage in the past decade, as millions of cameras have been installed on homes across the USA (and while Amazon-owned Ring is one of the largest doorbell-camera companies, there are dozens of others that can also provide footage). Until recently, people tended to implicitly trust security camera videos. Shown in documentaries as well as viral videos, they were considered media that wasn’t able to be tampered with. But now… you can’t even trust that.
We’re in a new age of AI videos, and I’d argue they pass the Video Turing Test, a process created in the ‘50s that tests people on whether or not they can determine if a piece of text is human written or computer. Today, computers are able to answer questions about videos, and these answers are near-identical to the same answers a person might give. Today’s AI computer software can hold a conversation, ask questions, and draw conclusions, which is why they’re able to make such convincing videos today. We can no longer trust our eyes and ears as we flick through TikTok videos or scroll through Facebook. We now have to assume that videos are fake before we assume they’re real.
This raises an interesting question: why would someone need to fake an AI video when there are thousands, probably millions, of videos of animals on the internet already?
Maybe it’s for the same reason there are AI-generated photos of young people in the same vintage style as their parents’ photos, or for the same reason that people use AI to simply add text to photos. It’s stolen photography and video that mimics its predecessors while actually displaying something that doesn’t even exist in the first place. AI devalues everything it consumes, inputting something real and exporting a sludgy, artless hybrid.
AI-generated image displaying text via Alitu
Photo via u/metaknowing
AI-generated photo via 9gag
There are many issues here. For one, this is going to create unrealistic expectations of animals. As one person put it during their own AI-animal deep-dive, “Why watch [Sir David] Attenborough when you can watch elephants fly south for the winter?” Why rely on actual animals, which do “boring” things like sleeping, lazily eating, or cuddling their babies, when you could watch the viral “monkey dropping a rock” video?
Yes, that’s right. In the latest eye-catching AI generated video to go mega-viral, with 15.9 million likes and 80k+ comments, a baby monkey in human clothing first drops a large rock on a group of humans in a bus. He then rushes down the mountain to the humans, who kick him. He cries big tears, much like a human baby, displaying fear while crouching under the bus, before chewing on the bus’s wires. Then the bus seemingly breaks down again, and also gets stopped by a giant rockslide. At this point, the video’s narrative is barely coherent. The audience is just supposed to think, “Aw, that monkey is so cute, and those humans are so mean to him!”
This monkey isn’t just an example of AI generated animals, he’s also the mascot for them right now. His name is Rio, and his Instagram page boasts 1.3 million followers. Rio is constantly getting into far fetched AI-generated adventures, and every single one gains millions of likes. He steals a shark from an aquarium and releases it into the wild. He lands on a desert island after clinging onto a plane as it takes flight, stealing an egg from a snake. He prepares food for humans, distributing it for needy children and dogs. The common denominators are that in almost every video, he is mistreated by humans, he cries like a human baby would, and he interacts with other cute animals.
Photo of AI-generated video clips via rio_4uai
What’s so wrong with generating these AI videos, besides the unclear narratives and the fact that Rio’s face morphs every few seconds? The damage to the actual environment, the only place that animals can live without encroaching onto human territory.
Using AI requires a lot of data, which is produced by large data centers. The electrical equipment at the heart of these data centers heat up quickly and must be cooled by water to avoid overheating. No, they can’t use air conditioning, the water component is a must. As consumers used AI in 2025, the electricity needed to power all these requests used a staggering 312.5 billion to 764.6 billion liters of water. This gave us the frightening fact that AI guzzled as much water as the entire bottled water industry in a single year.
The forecasts for the future show that AI will only get thirstier as humans use it more: by 2027, researchers think generative AI could slurp up 600 billion liters of water each year. Lest we forget, humans are animals needing water for survival, too. The whole AI experiment seems incredibly shortsighted, and we won’t be able to un-use all of that water once it’s finally too late.
Plus, all of this misinformation around animals won’t do them any favors. AI-generated clips can give the wrong impression of animal populations, like suggesting that a certain species is far more populous than they actually are, or highlighting behaviors that animals would never do in real life. People aren’t learning accurate information about animals. Researchers cited a fake video of a leopard and a house cat interacting, which would be “highly unlikely” to ever happen in real life. The video itself is so realistic-looking that it got fact-checked by Yahoo News. While adults might realize that a leopard wouldn’t allow a cat to ride on its back, a child might assume it’s real, because… Well, just look at it! What even looks fake about it? There are basically no clues to an untrained eye that would indicate its falseness.
Photo of AI-generated video via crazy.rabbit2d
AI generation seems like an issue that the internet will spend years trying to solve. Internet natives might get better at spotting AI videos, but there are also plenty of us who will fall for these videos over and over, blurring the lines of what reality is and what artificial intelligence can cobble together.
Perhaps we’ll just enjoy these videos while realizing that they’re not real (or particularly useful). And who knows, maybe they’ll find a home in meme culture, or sculpt out a niche that we haven’t even considered yet! We’re just at the beginning of the AI takeover, and there’s still plenty of interesting directions this trend could lead. For example, maybe someone will create AI videos of animals that no longer exist due to extinction, or informative videos of animals who are currently endangered. Perhaps there’s an artistry in these nonsensical clips. The world is our oyster when it comes to creating AI video gibberish, so we may as well create videos of those oysters bouncing on a trampoline. Today, let’s all drink a big glass of water while we still can, pet our real-life house cats and dogs (who won’t be riding on a leopard’s back), and be thankful for the good things in life that are actually real.
Author: Kayitsi.com
