Recently, while buying banh mi in my neighborhood, I noticed that the restaurant’s TV was showing what I thought was a nature documentary. At first, the image calmed me down. A calm humpback whale sails through the hazy blue sea, and a pod of killer whales glide beneath the ice of a glacier. But the longer I waited for my not-so-long banh mi, the more disturbing the video became. As a pod of eight or so killer whales moved eerily in line beneath the ice, which seemed a little too crystallized, I realized that the footage was AI, and at first I felt gloomy, then reassured that it had the ability to detect such things. I became anxious again when the video cut to footage that looked completely real. It was another humpback whale, its gray jaw scarred and covered in barnacles, gliding across the murky, sun-drenched waters. When I suggested that the footage might be real, I got into an argument with my friend, who insisted that the entire video was AI. Surely that couldn’t happen. Because this whale looked real to me.
Because of the nature of my work, friends and strangers often show me videos of animals that stir up feelings of awe, amazement, amazement, disgust, fear, disgust, or confusion. For years, this has been a feast and joy of beautiful creatures personally hand-picked for me. My Instagram DMs were filled with blue dragon sea slugs eating blue bottle jellyfish and the unrealistic telescopic eyes of strawberry conchs. I loved learning about new animals that my friends stumbled across. There are the female Boulanger backpack frogs, which carry eggs on their backs until they hatch, and the Yucatan cask-head tree frog, which has a large, bony head that resembles a duck. (I’m not sure why frogs feature in so many of these videos, but it’s flattering to me and a testament to the universal good vibes of amphibians.) I even appreciated the honorable creatures, like the pulsating protozoa of this slime mold and this ceramic statue of a land crab.
Something has changed in the last few years. At first, the slope was gentle. The animals had extra tentacles and anime eyes. A problem occurred when moving. Sometimes they encountered unrealistic situations, such as a video claiming that a giant squid was being “cleaned and rescued” off the coast of California. But gradually, almost without my noticing, the fake animals became more real. Their fur stood on end. They ran around more naturally. The video quality became more fuzzy, mimicking natural imperfect lighting conditions. But I still managed to find them, or at least that’s what I thought. I started opening the links that my friends sent me, feeling the fear around me. I was afraid that I would have to publish the news that I had been fooled by an AI, or that I too would be fooled.
I always considered myself an expert in the field of animal observation, as I look at dozens of animal photos every day at work. But I was beginning to doubt my own perceptions. As AI becomes more pervasive, I find that the sense of wonder and awe I felt towards the natural world has been replaced by an involuntary suspicion. I furrowed my brow as I studied each shiny frog and spiny insect until I was sure they were real. Strange Animals had to pass a sniff test for me to admire its strangeness. Then I found myself in a Vietnamese restaurant, glued to the TV screen, disconnected from reality. The vein in my forehead might have been throbbing as I stared at these whales, which seemed both real and unreal, desperately searching for clues to expose the cetaceans as fake AIs. But the clue was not in the whale. Rather, the video had the title “Unreal Planet Earth” in the corner.
Unreal Planet Earth uploads approximately one AI-generated nature documentary per day. Titles include “Inside the Deep | Where Every Layer Reveals a World of Living Things That Can’t Be Real” and “Deep Ocean | A Journey Through Every Depth There’s a Different World of Life.” The artificially generated narrators of these videos do indeed speak almost human-like, with soft intonations, but with shifted emphasis. And what is written there is barely concealed stupidity. How clear will the AI video be? I lost the argument. Why would such a “documentary” go to the trouble of using incomplete, grainy real-world footage that is prohibitively expensive to shoot, requires travel to remote locations, and deep knowledge of the animals’ daily lives when they can easily produce near-reproductions of the animals viewers want to see? It’s now clear that none of that was true. But I just wanted to believe.
As a child in the 90s and early 2000s, I learned to appreciate wild animals through television series like Animal Planet. The series promised animals so extreme and bizarre that it was hard to believe they were real, including color-changing chameleons, bioluminescent fish, and birds doing crazy sexy dances. Luxury high budget series like planet earth and blue planet It has made nature even more incredible, revealing the incredible drama of life and death that unfolds in the wilderness we have left.
This is what I have always believed is the purpose of nature documentaries. That means showing people the beauty of our planet in the hopes that they will be moved to help save it. But perhaps this was only true in the 90s, with Rainforest Cafe and free willy and captain planet and Shirts warning that time is running out to save the planet are now available in abundance as vintage items on eBay. Perhaps this was the idea of a naive child who had yet to become a cynic. For some, the purpose of nature documentaries is simply to have fun. And if it’s funny enough, they probably won’t care if it’s not real.
It seems like more people are now seeing nature through Instagram Reels and TikTok, which showcase short, unvetted videos. I appreciated when people sent me these videos, but I never looked for them myself. At best, these animal videos lack context. In the worst case scenario, the caption or video itself can spread misinformation. Animal facts and situations are often exaggerated to make the video look more dramatic and more click-worthy. It was inevitable that AI would prey on what I believe to be a deep human instinct: the desire to know more about what else is out there on Earth.
There is no doubt that these videos bring joy to some people. Even if someone knows it’s true. But of course, this is not the mission of the humans who generate these AI videos and upload them to social media platforms where they can be monetized. Their mission is to get paid. A 2025 paper warned of many abuses of generative AI in wildlife. That means creating fake species, stoking fears of human-wildlife conflict, and misleading people into thinking it’s a good idea to pet a polar bear. There is a cruel irony in a video of an artificially generated chameleon changing colors, which may teach people to value nature by providing an eerie imitation of nature created by the very forces that threaten to destroy chameleons’ lives. Each AI video of an animal requires one gallon of fresh water, creating planet-warming carbon emissions that real chameleons depend on.
It is precisely because of their realism that nature documentaries evoke such a universal sense of awe. The diversity of life on Earth is so magnificent, strange, and vast that even the presence of a single beetle is dizzying. but it is necessary exist. The very concept of artificially generated wildlife videos is sacrilegious and based on a level of selfishness that is difficult for me to understand. When I watch these videos, I feel fear for the future, a world like an old man scrolling through videos of polar bears riding piggy-backs among ice floes. All real glaciers should be melting, so at least I’ll know for sure that the video is AI.
