[TorqueDog]

There's a ton of AI generated stuff that really just takes the joy out of a video for me.

My girlfriend was scrolling through Instagram and saw a reel with a family of Pallas cats on the side of a mountain highway with vehicles very slowly crawling past.

"Aw, cute", she muses, and forwards it to me. We both like pallas cats, they're awesome.

So I get the video and immediately I can tell the video is an AI-generated fake. First, the compression-like artefacting all over the elements not entirely in the foreground that disappear as the clip zooms in, but you can tell this isn't the lens focal length causing the blurriness. You can also tell there's a quality about the cats in the video -- their fur, the transition from their fur to the roadway behind them, how their faces look, etc. -- that betrays the illusion. I mean never mind that pallas cats are from a part of the world that this video clearly wasn't shot in if it was real, but then you also get a view of the vehicles that are rolling past just before the quick zoom in, and you can tell it's generative AI on the 'low' quality setting just crapping out "here's what a white SUV inspired by a Honda CRV looks like" to make it look like a real vehicle.

AI-generated animal videos are the worst. The whole point of funny animal interactions is that they actually happened in the first place.

For me, AI slop is stuff like that. Making what would normally be a noteworthy moment, something that "Oh wow, I can't believe this is actually happening" or "Aww that's adorable" and just synthesizing it. It lacks the appeal of the actual thing entirely.