As is her habit, yesterday evening my wife brought me various images and videos that she had found amusing on social media. These curations of hers are notably weighted towards ‘cute’ content laced with endearing animals and plush characters.
Shortly, she showed me something that she had saved but not had time to actually look at yet – a ‘cute animals’ video featuring an interaction between a female koala, her two sleeping newborns, and a curious cat.
Right off the mark, I wondered how a young domestic cat would have access to the same space as these wild animals, even presuming a ‘zoo’ environment or context. Yet I batted the thought away like an annoying mosquito, because it’s adequately covered under ‘life is strange’.
This video featured a very static, tight-focus shot of a mother koala with her sleeping two offspring. The mother was leaning on an unremarkable wall.
A young, circumspect tabby cat entered the frame, driven past its apprehension by curiosity, and sidled up to the sleeping cubs – all the time keeping a weather eye on the mother, who might take a dim view of this intervention.
In about a half-minute of this hypothetical stalemate the mother koala reached out and grabbed her baby. The young cat was swooped by the hawk., holding it for a few moments, in a manner entirely consistent with the two animals’ relative weights and physiognomies; and then settled the interloper down next to its offspring, as an ‘acceptable guest’.*
It’s a new cat for a new problem
At this point, at about the same moment, my wife and I declared that this video was likely to be AI-generated, and we expressed what I can only describe as a sense of ‘suspended disappointment’; for us, this was literally a new You could also try of Schrödinger’s cat – out of the box at last, Not necessarily living.
It is not something I’ve looked up to check if anyone has admitted that the video was fake. Or if this video had been posted in the past, when it wasn’t possible to produce such content for pennies through a variety of portals and websites. accusing the material of being AI-generated, Even though it may be that they don’t know for sure.
Whether or not that particular video was fake or real is immaterial; what struck me was that I had finally arrived at a long-awaited, long-expected epiphany – that, notwithstanding the fact that I have provided deep and intensive coverage** of AI-generated image and video systems (as well as discussing and creating Even I, who has been using deep-fake detection systems (since 2007) cannot believe what I’m seeing any more.
The biggest remaining bottleneck for AI video synthesis – inconsistency – is no obstacle to creating the kind of short-form content most likely to go viral. The AI will fill in our shrinking attention spans perfectly, but not more. challenging as they areIt will ultimately be overthrown.
Therefore, this belated (and possibly even mistaken) thought about the koala video fits into a lifetime of ‘where I was’ moments: Elvis is dead and Mum is up on the ladder painting the ceiling.; The star-destroyer thunders above at the Christmas Eve 1977 Leicester Square Public Premiere of Star Wars; The T-Rex escapes its enclosure, once again, at Leicester Square in July 1993; Mara says (in Italian) ‘Come into the kitchen, guys – there’s something happening in New York’; I look at the cat in the koala video and I realize that this is the year, and – for me – the moment, that reality died.
(You can even You can also find out more about the following: Kennedy shot off the planet.)
The ‘Enemy at the Gates’ Response
According to one researcher our ability to recognize AI-generated pictures will be enhanced by late 2025. is not far above chance, at 54%. Take the test for yourself – I didn’t do that well with it, and the quality of genAI has improved notably in the intervening eight or nine months:
Click here to Play – Despite years of study, when rating images as AI-generated or real, I score almost the exact average found in the tests conducted for the cited study. Source
The Washington Post published one of the earliest prognostications Only a couple months after deepfakes based on autoencoders, February 2018 saw the emergence of an alleged post-reality. first astonished the world. This piece becomes a rallying cry of alarm for regulations, which would eventually come as legislation against sexual deepfakesThe EU’s new law Concerning the Disclosure of AI-generated Material; and The Coalition for Content Provenance and AuthenticityC2PA) authentication system.
This tries to attach information about the image over its entire life, including camera sensor data, publication, and archive, noting any changes made along its path. amending its manifest accordingly.
The cradle-to grave method ignores the vast majority of existing imagery and is primarily aimed at the consumer. very limited number of places The law has been adopted.
How many fingers am I holding up?
The point to make is that, in spite of the fact that these knee-jerk editorials from early 2018, the desire for regulations around AI-generated material has increased enormously, it is a cry for more regulation. Automation or delegation of judgement.
Either we do not want to do that work, and want governments and institutions to do it for us; or we do not feel that certain other people – or The following are examples of of people – should be left to make these judgements (a standpoint that is not a credit to those who hold it).
Hadn’t i already said, maybe a little dejectedly, that l wouldn’t look into the source of the cat/koala video? I’m in the same place as George Orwell in his book, “Elastic Belief”, because I don’t know whether or not that video is fake. Nineteen Eighty-FourThe protagonist of the film is psychologically tortured until he can hold two opposing views.
Michael Radford’s adaptation of Orwell’s dystopian SF classic, 1984, shows a tortured Winston Smith, played by John Hurt, beginning to admit that, in reality, four fingers may equal three, and his eyes should not be taken at face value. Still from 1984 (1984), © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. / Amazon MGM Studios.
In Orwell’s novel, the antagonist O’Brien character (played by Richard Burton in the 1984 adaptation pictured above) explicitly states to his victims that his aim in using torture is to render their beliefs ductile, so that they can – as suits the totalitarian state depicted in that work – simultaneously hold two beliefs – such as that four fingers held up can also be three fingers, if the State requires it.
This ‘elasticity of belief’ is naturally prized among influencers of all kinds, since it more normally tends to have ossified by the time voters – or consumers – have matured into desirable targets for influence.
The koala/cat videos is what I find most appealing. The following are some of the ways to improve your own language skills. ‘AI’ and ‘not AI’, I have taken the first steps toward becoming habituated into Dual BeliefI am also receptive to anyone who offers to help me stop the binary, strobing perception and tell what’s real.
It occurs to me, therefore, that I should resist this epiphany, rather than prize it. That inner concession to ‘irreality’ that came to me in the form of a ‘cute animals’ video, and might have come to you – or will yet come to you – in another form, is arguably a hazard to one’s own ability to judge and weigh the world.
The Lighter Side of Life
In 2024, Joshua Habgood Coote, a philosopher, took an optimistic view. discounting the ‘epistemic apocalypse’ as alarmism around the loss of systems that were in any case, fragile, and – in the case of photography – rather recent.
He also makes a case, but in a more recent outingThe memes ‘fake news’ The following are some examples of how to get started: ‘post-truth’ Weaponized to achieve political goals, and this is unquestionable in the first case (even though it may be more a matter of political opportunism than conspiracy).
* And are you in fact wondering if this convenient example is even real, or if I summoned it up – with or without AI – as a discursive device? This is real. If the fact that I’m here proves it. not a new voice You may believe I am telling the truth. Have I? changed lately..?
** This includes citations In diverse literary entries, such as The Cambridge Handbook of Generative AI and the Law (for Weights in Machine Learning).
First published on September 4, 2026. A few minutes after the initial publication was made to correct errors around Koalas. Later that same day it was amended again for missing tags.
