TikTok is filling up with weird AI-generated videos of babies in peril. It’s the sign of a strange new era in entertainment…
It’s unbearably hot, dear reader, and TikTok won’t stop showing me AI-generated videos of babies in peril.
I only have myself to blame: I dwelled too long on one clip of an infant dragged out of the sea by a dog, and now The Algorithm thinks this is all I want to see. Ghouls stealing babies and dangling them over fires; babies crawling into gigantic potholes; babies abandoned on beaches; babies stuck on roofs in the middle of raging storms.
The Algorithm thinks I want to see nothing but babies from the uncanny valley, and now I’m trapped in a peculiarly modern feedback loop.
So how did I get here?
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In the dot com boom of the late 1990s, Amazon came to the fore because it could do something bricks-and-mortar shops couldn’t: its display of products could change according to the interests of an individual customer. It could make recommendations based on that user’s earlier purchases. If you liked this book, then you might like these other titles.
A generation later, algorithms define much of what we see online and elsewhere. In the realm of film, Disney’s string of live-action remakes are a natural progression from Amazon’s pioneering approach to shopping: if you loved The Lion King in the 1990s, then maybe you and your kids will enjoy the remake. It’s more of what you loved, but newer and glossier.
Generative AI is a further evolution of the Amazon model, both technically and in the way it creates a feedback loop between itself and its users. Whether it’s producing text, sound or images, gen-AI takes existing artwork and information – a huge sea of data and ideas from across the internet – and synthesises it into a result based on a user’s prompt. You can’t have missed some of the outputs floating around on social media: famous films in the delicate anime style of Studio Ghibli, for example. It’s a new mode of image creation that has some legacy media firms up in arms; Disney and Universal are jointly suing the AI company, Midjourney. Its lawsuit describes how Midjourney’s software can be used to create images of such characters as Darth Vader, Shrek, Wall-E and more besides with a simple text prompt.
The software is, according to the studios’ lawyers, “a bottomless pit of plagiarism.”
In other words, gen-AI is designed not to produce staggering new works of art, but to satisfy an unquenchable thirst for more iterations of things that already exist. Some filmmakers are trying to find artistic uses for gen-AI, admittedly; filmmaker Eliza McNitt added the new technology to her VFX workflow to make Ancestra, a personal short film about childbirth and motherhood. Poker Face star Natasha Lyonne is currently making a science fiction movie, Uncanny Valley, which she says will use ‘ethical’ AI to realise certain sequences.
It only takes a cursory look around TikTok and YouTube to see the real direction of travel for gen-AI, however. Head to the latter platform and type in the words ‘film stories’ (yes, the name of this outlet) and you’ll be met with a barrage of videos which use gen-AI for their thumbnails or for the entirety of the video’s imagery. As you’ll quickly discover from a quick browse, gen-AI has proliferated especially quickly in the relatively new vertical realm of TikTok, YouTube Shorts and the like.
Among the results from that ‘film stories’ search, you’ll find a strangely disquieting short film about a mermaid. The creature’s shown lying on a beach before being dragged off to a circus by a little dog. The same dog also appeared in another viral clip in which it rescued a baby falling from a jumbo jet – which is how I ended up in my TikTok AI baby hall of mirrors described above.
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As celebrity streamer and YouTuber Penguinz0 pointed out in a recent video, these dog rescue clips have been enormously popular: the one with the mermaid has 30m views on YouTube alone at the time of writing; the jumbo jet baby clip has 47m views. The numbers on TikTok are even higher. Whatever you think about their artistic merits, these videos have clearly found an audience among social media users.
Vertical takeoff
It goes without saying that the way the planet consumes entertainment is changing at speed. More people have the YouTube app installed on their televisions than Netflix or Disney+. Those rival streaming companies, once dismissive of YouTube and similar platforms, have now begun to take notice. Netflix has vertically-shaped thumbnails, paving the way for TikTok-like vertical output. (The company also has an AI feature planned, which will allow people to do natural language voice searches.)
All of which means we could see more and more short, vertical dramas appear in the near future. Economically produced stories like My Secret Agent Husband and Found A Homeless Billionaire Husband For Christmas have hooked in millions of views. They could mark the beginning of a new trend, as Google CEO Sanjay Gupta said at a recent conference in Asia, a region where the average person “now watches seven hours of stories daily,” according to Variety.
“We are seeking stories designed for on the go consumption,” Gupta said. And that growing demand for more short form, quick fix entertainment, he added, could be met with the help of gen-AI: “This is a movement for Asia’s media industry. AI, combined with the ingenuity, dynamism and rich storytelling of this region and the large population will turbocharge creativity.”
Free and easy
Certainly, the baby-in-peril videos described here would have been prohibitively expensive and slow to produce even a couple of years ago. Whether their makers employed traditional animation, VFX, puppetry or a mixture of all of these, the process would once have been lengthy and costly. In fact, the endeavour would likely have seemed so risky that it may never have gotten past the concept stage. Would audiences watch such an odd video, and if so, how would they pay for it?
The vast majority of this shortform entertainment is essentially free to the viewer, or so close to free as to be meaningless. Gen-AI therefore fulfills another anomaly in our 21st century system: if nobody pays for entertainment, then everything must be made quickly and cheaply.
It’s why for years outlets like Buzzfeed thrived on quizzes and lists: it was cheap and relatively quick to produce, and could fund more in-depth journalism, which is time consuming to write and expensive to fund. As the death of Buzzfeed has proven, even that business model is now endangered. And as publishing races to find a way to make the written word pay in a new world of AI and vampiric Google search results, filmed output now faces a similar sea change.
Some filmmakers are optimistic about the creative possibilities that AI could bring. James Cameron has been a vocal advocate; Jurassic World Rebirth director Gareth Edwards, who has a strong background in VFX, is similarly upbeat about the technology. “I get excited about these new tools that are coming out,” he told us recently. “I think, ultimately, it’s going to liberate storytelling – but it’s going to be a bumpy ride on the way to that, I think.”
We’re already seeing various forms of AI being used in the film industry. Deep fake technology has been used to de-age faces in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and add a baby to an action sequence in Thor: Love And Thunder. A form of AI tech has also been used to massage dialogue in The Fall Guy, The Brutalist and the Swedish sci-fi film, Watch The Skies.
But there’s also the danger that AI will be used to turbo-charge an existing trend of glossed-up remakes and re-jigged hits from the past. In this respect, author Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One – adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 2018 – was eerily apt for the reality we’re heading towards. It depicts a future so run-down and dystopian that the huddled masses spend much of their waking hours living inside a videogame – a nostalgic virtual world full of pop cultural artefacts from the 1980s. The game cossets its users with an endless supply of their favourite, most comforting things.
The haunting
Back in the miniature cosmos of our smartphones, the algorithms that govern what we see on the likes of TikTok and YouTube promise a similarly immersive virtual world: one in which we’re served an endless supply of dopamine-rush clips and snippets of entertainment based on stuff we’ve previously watched. Hence the vast number of increasingly bizarre ‘baby rescue’ videos now all over TikTok, which have clearly been rushed out to capitalise on a popular trend. Will there eventually be a backlash from users over this growing tide of AI-generated output? Or in our busy, easily-distracted world, will it simply be deemed ‘good enough’ to pass as a worthwhile diversion on a commute?
The journalist and documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis had something apt to say about this particular form of AI on The Rest Is Politics podcast in June. AI, he said, is “the ghost of our time,” because it’s essentially “haunting us” with fragments of our cultural relics.
“It’s going back to our own images, our own language,” Curtis said. “The words we wrote, our own emotions. Because out there in the server farms are our feelings in fragmentary forms – little images, little moments. Intense moments of fear and love. And [AI] is scraping it all, putting it all together in some strange, cubist form, and playing it back to us.”
Those eerie AI baby videos are a small part of this algorithmic haunting. As TikTok users scroll through the app, the sight of an endangered baby triggers a primal response, and so they can’t help but keep watching to see what happens next. The videos achieve huge numbers, and so content creators – to use a grim term – make more of them. It’s a moebius loop of algorithmically-generated entertainment served up to viewers by algorithms.
In essence, it’s the Amazon or Disney live-action remake paradigm taken to the next, logical stage: more of what you want, for ever and ever.
“If I was going to write a ghost story about now,” Adam Curtis said, “it’d be about that: we are haunted. Which makes me suspect that AI is not the future, it’s the end of the past. It’s the moment at which the past came for us. And we will have to escape from it.”
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