AI Video Goes Viral and People Realize They Can't Tell Real From Fake Anymore

Would you have fallen for the emotional support kangaroo?

As a wise man once told me, the trouble with AI won’t come from the impossible, but from the almost-true, always lingering on the fringes of reality.

The first high-quality AI video has gone viral, in the proper sense of the word: It has reached and fooled millions of people. It features a cute “emotional support” kangaroo being denied access to a plane. As it ends, the video zooms in on the kangaroo and shows him holding the boarding pass.

This short clip is the perfect mix of cute and hilarious—and, if you fall for it without realizing it's AI-generated, also infuriating and heartbreaking. That’s the perfect recipe for virality: enrage the gullible; delight the astute.

Originally published on Instagram as a reel, the video was later shared on X by a yellow tick tabloid account with nearly 800,000 followers under the caption “Emotional support kangaroo rejected entry to plane.” It has since been taken down and flagged with a community note, but not before amassing 70 million views just from that tweet.

I guess we are well past the “responsibility of intellectuals” phase and into the “responsibility of influencers” phase, bleaker as that sounds.

The reactions to the video are a mix of “Let him on the plane!!!” and “Dude, this is AI” and “I can't believe that was AI. I fell for it. It's over.” (To make the story a bit meta, I’ll confess that, at this point, I cannot tell how many of these people are bots, nor if the real ones are reacting genuinely or for clout. We're knee-deep in post-reality.)

Here's a selection of reactions, each of them with thousands of likes and millions of views:

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

---

---

This tweet was especially funny: “Remember how just a year ago this entire site was laughing at boomers on fb falling for the most absurd AI slop?” I remember. It's no longer just boomers on Facebook. It's all of us, everyone on any social platform.

Source

I found it easy to tell the video is AI—and, as a reader of this blog, you probably did, too—because 1) it's slop and 2) I'm aware of the existence of Google’s Veo 3 and whatnot (not sure if the video is from Veo 3 or a different model). But most people aren’t. Soon, it won't be easy to tell even for us, AI-savvy users.

The quote-tweets to this latter tweet reveal the decline is well underway:

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

And it goes on and on and on.

I don't feel like ending with a take or something. I shared—literally, three days ago—10 huge implications on culture, creativity, and business that I foresee as a result of high-quality AI videos being readily available, and at least three have already been proven true from that slop.

• Videos are no longer a source of ground truth, and this will be harder to internalize than it was with text or images.

• Now that people have realized AI can do this, they will swing the epistemic pendulum to the other extreme, incurring many false positives (thinking the real as fake).

• From now on, you can only trust what you already know you can trust (and even your reliable sources will sometimes share fake news passing as real).

So this post is not a prescription, just a description: this is the new world we have.

I just hope you guys won't be needing an emotional support kangaroo anytime soon because they're not real. (As far as I can tell, perhaps in Australia?)