Published December 10, 2025 at 3:48pm
A black bear peers into a suburban front yard decorated for Halloween. One of the decorations is an animatronic ghost whose sensors are activated by the animal's approach, causing it to tremble, groan, and begin to glow. The frightened bear turned and ran away as fast as he could, crashing head-on into the homeowner's pickup truck.
My Ring camera captured this crazy video in the garden!! Read the caption over the video.
This clip caught my attention when it appeared on my Instagram feed a few months ago. I'm a big fan of wildlife video, especially footage of whimsical animal activity captured by wildlife cameras, dashcams, or home surveillance devices. Like I've done so many times before, I mindlessly clicked the “like” button, shared the bear video with a few friends, and then went back to brain-dead scrolling.
Unbeknownst to me, this video was fake and was just an AI-generated clip circulating on the internet. I clicked to verify it, and Instagram's algorithm immediately flooded my feed with a bunch of trippy AI wildlife videos. In quick succession, I watched a porch pirate raccoon attack a decorative clown. A barn owl pecks a rock climber on the side of El Capitan. A marauding squirrel chases a grizzly bear on a bike path.
I have watched hundreds of videos and researched this content. Yes, I knew they were fake. But they appealed to my brain just as much as the real thing, and my neurons tingled as I endlessly scrolled through them. Within a few hours, I was hooked on the AI wildlife videos.
This suffering didn't last long, but after a few days I came to an unfortunate realization. You can no longer tell the difference between real, quirky animal videos and videos created by generative AI.
“When you start thinking that some of it could be fake, you start thinking that everything could be fake,” AI expert Ben Coleman told me. “And now, almost everything you see or hear on the internet can be deepfaked.”
I was confused and troubled by the brain's reaction to the AI's garbage food. So I consulted some experts to try to understand what has changed inside my skull and whether it might be possible to tell the real thing from a fake animal video.
AI videos go from goofy to great
We all remember the flashy AI videos that first appeared on social media feeds in 2023. I couldn't ignore the imperfections. People with bad fingers or extra teeth, objects that magically appear and disappear, things that mysteriously melt or flare up. Check out this AI cooking video and relive the charm.
Those days are long gone. Powerful new video AI models released in recent months, including OpenAI's Sora 2, Google's Veo 3, and LTX Studio, have closed the quality gap.
“A year ago, we could have explained everything you could look at to identify AI video,” Coleman told me. “But now it's so good that even the PhDs on our team can't tell the difference.”
I reached out to Coleman in late December to ask about the rise in AI wildlife videos. Coleman is the CEO and co-founder of a cybersecurity company called Reality Defender. The company seeks to identify harmful AI videos and flag them or have them removed by social platforms. Major companies and even government agencies rely on Reality Defender to identify content that can cost companies millions of dollars.
But even companies like Reality Defender face the same hurdles I encountered while scrolling. It's just that AI video is too good.
Francesco Cavalli, co-founder of another AI security company, Sensity AI, recently said, “Without the help of tools, it is nearly impossible for the average internet user to understand whether an image, video, or audio was generated by an AI.” fast company.
Governments and companies are willing to pay companies to screen out what's truly harmful, but they don't have the same incentive to police whimsical videos of bears, raccoons, and squirrels.
There's another reason why the volume of AI wildlife videos has grown so quickly. The grainy video quality of home surveillance devices and wildlife cameras is relatively easy for AI to reproduce.
“A few years ago, it cost $15,000 to make a fake video of you or me. Now it's basically free,” Coleman added.
The phenomenon gained mainstream attention in August when the goofy animal clip Patient Zero garnered national attention. Eight seconds of backyard surveillance video showed a group of rabbits happily bouncing on a trampoline. You better believe I saw that clip.
The video was eventually determined to be fake, but not until it had racked up over 240 million views on TikTok. This clip was so popular that people started making their own imitators. Now you can watch squirrels, raccoons, deer, bears, and even elephants bouncing up and down on the same trampoline.
Why create AI animal videos?
So why spend so much time and effort creating AI videos of raccoons eating candy or squirrels attacking bears? When I asked Coleman this question, he laughed. “I can't explain why creators do what they do,” he says. “You should ask one of them.”
So I did. After a long process of sending messages on various social media platforms, I got in touch with a man named Omar. Omar is the brain behind the Instagram handle @Wildencountermoments. This is what you get when you throw all of David Attenborough's wildlife movies and a bunch of jump-scare horror movies into a blender.
Omar said he shoots wildlife videos as a full-time job from his home in Egypt. “I treat this project as a digital media startup,” he said. “It evolved from a passion project into a professional career.”
He was surprisingly candid about the process of creating the video. He told me that he was researching stories of animal encounters to develop concepts for his videos. Then, watch real animal videos from dashcams and conservation cameras (yes, that's my favorite) to understand animal behavior.
Omar feeds the idea description into a generative AI model to get the raw clip. Then use professional post-production software to fine-tune color, sound, and motion.
“It can take hours to make one 15-second clip,” he told me. “It takes a lot of trial and error to generate the perfect movement, and sound design takes up a huge portion of our time. Silent video never feels real, so it's important to add very realistic breathing, footsteps, and natural atmosphere.”
but why?
Omar said he has long been fascinated by the “raw” moments of nature that are often omitted from traditional documentaries. High-tension, scary moments like a shark attack and a close encounter with a hungry carnivore. “I want to use technology to safely recreate that adrenaline rush and feeling of being vulnerable in nature.”
He calls his work “hyperreal digital cinema” and likens his videos to found footage Hollywood films such as: clover field or Blair Witch Project. He believes viewers know the clip is fake but suspend their disbelief for the sake of entertainment. His Instagram profile clearly states that his footage is generated by AI. “My goal is not to deceive, but to enthrall,” he said. “We blur the lines between reality and digital art to create experiences.”
I asked Omar if he considers himself as an artist and his videos as expression.
“Just like filmmakers use CGI to bring dinosaurs to life in movies, I use generative AI to bring ‘what if’ survival scenarios for social media to life,” he said. “The medium is different, but the goal is the same: it's storytelling. It's an artistic expression of fear, nature, and the unknown, designed to evoke a true emotional response from the viewer.”
Understand AI
Who am I to disagree with Omar's ideas about art? While his comments answered my question about why there is so much AI animal footage online, they did little to help me understand how to parse the fake from the real.
Mr. Colman offered this advice: Look for videos that are sponsored or released in collaboration with public agencies such as national parks. If a clip seems too weird and outlandish to be true, it probably is.
If in doubt, watch the live video feed.
“In the live space, doing real-time live deepfakes is still quite expensive,” he said. “We can have a little more confidence in live video, at least for now.”
Following Colman's advice, I clicked on a YouTube channel with a live feed from a wildlife camera set up somewhere in Denmark. For 10 minutes, I stared at a live video of a stream flowing beside a tree. Not a single animal entered the camera frame. It's not even a bug.
I fought the urge to pick up my phone and start scrolling through Instagram. And as I struggled with that reflex that so many of us are battling right now, I had a second epiphany about goofy, amazing, or hilarious animal videos – the legitimate kind – and why I still love them.
These clips, from a bear taking a selfie to an otter stealing a surfboard, represent magical moments when different elements come together by chance. Animals were doing weird, cute, or scary things, and there was a camera there to capture it.
The reality is that most amazing animal activity goes unnoticed and undocumented, and the vast majority of wildlife camera footage is mind-bogglingly boring.
As generative AI continues to evolve rapidly, this is a lesson I want to remember. I have no doubt that the other types of outdoor videos I crave (from skiers sliding down giant slopes to cyclists jumping off jumps) will soon have AI-generated counterparts.
But like our friend the bear who is spooked by a ghost in his backyard, not everything we see is made to be believed.
