OpenAI gave the masses video generation tools, and instead of democratizing filmmaking or revolutionizing education, we got fake dogs dying on Everest, teens terrorizing parents with AI homeless people, and women catfishing their boyfriends with synthetic shirtless plumbers. This is the golden age of the AI prankster, and it’s exactly as stupid as it sounds.
The Dog That Never Lived
Last week on TikTok, a video went viral: a woman burying her dog in the snow on Mount Everest after the animal died during the climb. Comments erupted in outrage—animal cruelty, irresponsible pet ownership, why would you bring a dog to Everest. Except none of it happened. The woman doesn’t exist. The dog doesn’t exist. The mountain in the video isn’t real. It was all generated by Sora, OpenAI’s video tool, probably from a handful of prompt lines. The account removed the watermark, posted it, and watched thousands of people have genuine emotional reactions to complete fiction.
And it’s not just sad dogs. Viral bunnies bouncing on trampolines? Fake. Dogs taking down chandeliers at weddings? Fake. All of it looks “just lifelike enough to make the viewer question if what they’re seeing is real,” which is the exact problem. The content floods feeds, algorithms love it because engagement is through the roof, and nobody can tell what’s real anymore.
https://www.businessinsider.com/use-case-ai-videos-dumb-pranks-sora-tiktok-deepfakes-2025-10
Teens Are Pranking Parents, Police Are Issuing Warnings
Here’s the latest teen prank making the rounds: generate an image of a disheveled homeless man, send it to your parents with a text saying “this guy just walked into our house,” then screenshot their panicked responses for internet points. It’s become so widespread that local police departments are issuing public service announcements calling it “stupid and potentially dangerous”. Parents call 911, emergency resources get diverted, and teenagers post the text exchanges for likes. Meanwhile, women are generating images of hot, shirtless plumbers and sending them to boyfriends and husbands to trigger jealousy—because why not?
The Children of MLK and Robin Williams Are Begging You to Stop
The darkest version of this trend involves dead public figures. People are generating videos of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robin Williams, putting words in their mouths they never said, and spreading them across social platforms. The children of these deceased icons are publicly pleading for it to stop. OpenAI paused MLK videos and says estates can request opt-outs for using images of the deceased. But in practice? Watermarks get stripped in seconds, content spreads faster than moderators can respond, and the genie isn’t going back in the bottle.
Guillermo del Toro Hopes He Dies Before AI Art Goes Mainstream
The Oscar-winning director of “The Shape of Water” said this week that he hopes he’s dead before AI-generated art becomes mainstream. That’s not Luddism—that’s despair from an artist watching technology turn creativity into a commodity where “making content” matters more than creating meaning.
AI ethicist Olivia Gambelin nails the core issue: AI companies released these tools and essentially told the public, “You figure out what to do with this,” instead of defining practical, fundamental use cases. The result? People are using revolutionary generative technology to make fake dogs and troll their parents. “The stupid uses are the easiest ones to wrap our minds around,” Gambelin says. The philosophical question—what problem are we actually solving with AI-generated video?—remains unanswered.
Google Gives Away AI to Half a Billion Indians
While the West pranks itself into oblivion, Google announced it’s offering Gemini AI for free to over **500 million Jio users** in India. This isn’t charity—it’s market capture. Whoever gets half a billion people accustomed to their AI interface first locks in loyalty for decades. OpenAI is prepping a $1 trillion IPO, and Google is giving away the product to ensure it doesn’t lose Asia. This is a war for minds disguised as generosity.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/30th-31st-october-ai-news-daily-openai-plans-1-ipo-global-cholleti-bj8fc
Reddit CEO: “We See Both Sides” (On AI Data Scraping)
Reddit’s CEO commented on lawsuits against AI companies scraping user data, saying “we see both sides of this”. Translation: “We want to sell our data to AI companies for millions but don’t want to look greedy to our users.” Classic platform stance—monetize content you didn’t create while maintaining plausible deniability.
https://thirdruntime.com
The AI Bubble Has Reached Its “Fried Chicken Phase”
Analysts are describing the current state of AI as the “fried chicken phase”—peak hype, questionable underlying value. Everyone’s investing. Everyone’s launching products. Nobody knows how to monetize. And users are deploying the technology for… fake dog pranks.
What This Actually Means
AI video generation went from the unsettling Will Smith spaghetti video in 2023 to indistinguishable-from-reality clips in 2025. The technology became so simple and fast that creating content is “about as quick as firing off a bad tweet”. The result? The internet is drowning in “AI slop”—meaningless but viral content that trains algorithms to serve more slop.
UC Berkeley’s Hany Farid sums it up: “In some ways this is not an algorithmic problem, it’s a human problem. People are making slop and watching slop”. And filmmakers are hoping they die before it becomes normalized. Welcome to the future.
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