We are in a truly head-spinning and dangerous dark age when it comes to basic media literacy skills, and AI is taking this problem to a terrifying extreme.
Case in point: an obvious AI TikTok video, that is even labeled as AI, of actor Penn Badgley dressed in a Spain jersey before the World Cup Final.
Everyone seems to have fallen for it, despite there being quite a few tells that the video is fake.
The video features a man who looks shockingly similar to Badgley, best known for his roles on You and Gossip Girl, sitting in a car in a Spain jersey flexing his biceps for the camera.
In an X post that made the video viral, the caption reads:
“Penn Badgley supporting Spain in the World Cup final.”
But the fact of the matter is that even just a few seconds of due diligence would have made this very obvious.
For starters, the proportions of the structure of the car he's filming in are bizarrely off and unlike any car anyone has ever been in.
And at no point does Badgley speak, a common feature of AI thirst traps. The movements are also a bit awkward and unnatural—and also wildly cringe for a celebrity of Badgley's status and age to be making in the first place.
Speaking of age, the man in the video is also obviously way too young to be present-day Badgley, to the point that pulling Badgley up on Google Images makes it instantly apparent the video can't be real.
@joe.goldberg710 Are you supporting Argentina or Spain tomorrow? #spainworldcup #worldcup #argentina #football #foryou
And that's before we get into the most obvious indicator: The TikTok screenname in the video's watermark, which is not only not Badgley's, but leads to an account with the following bio:
"IM NOT THE REAL @Penn Badgley MY VIDEOS ARE AI"
There's also a handy link to the AI tool the account uses, likely because the account itself is paid promotion for said tool.
Nevertheless, that didn't stop anyone from simply assuming it was real, and immediately thirsting after the AI Spain fan Badgley.
While others clocked the video's weird discrepancies, but failed to piece together that they added up to a fake video.
The problem, of course, is that at this point AI is so advanced that it has lost much of its obviousness unless you have taken the time to inform yourself (and even then...). And that had a lot of people terrified.
As writer and activist @fatfabfeminist put it in a viral quote-tweet:
“the fact that this is ai is horrifying like the fact that we genuinely cannot believe the sh*t we see with our own fu**ing eyes is so scary.”
To be fair, that is often true. At this point, even many experts on the matter have had to post examples of AI videos that duped even them.
But just as often, it's not actually true at all: It's just that nobody bothers to actually learn how to clock them.
And in the world we're now living in, nobody—absolutely nobody—gets to excuse themselves from that responsibility.
It's not our fault, of course, that our country's entire media ecosystem has been compromised and nobody cares about fixing it.
And it's not our fault, obviously, that the tech industry has absolutely no interest in reining in AI tools for the good and safety of the general public.
But it's also not our fault that a car crash can kill us, for example. We still take it upon ourselves to learn how to safely operate them, and put on our seat belts.
There are myriad resources online for us all to teach ourselves how to identify AI fakes. For now anyway.
Because the longer we all refuse to do so, the more time the tech industry has to develop AI tools that truly are entirely undetectable.
And it should be clear by now that nobody in tech, and certainly nobody in our government, cares one bit about the repercussions.
@TheWhiteHouse/X
