AI-generated videos and pictures are destroying one of the largest and most enduring sources of joy and compassion on the internet: animals.
Whether the imagery features sailors rescuing a polar bear, baby cows separated from their mothers, or a lost pet that was miraculously found, many people have reached the point where they can’t take the creatures on their feeds at face value anymore. The explosion of deepfakes and AI slop over the past few years has led to widespread frustration among viewers, creators, and organizations that support animals, forcing everyone to hunt in the pixels for glitches or other telltale signs of AI.
A cat that never came back
Mibbby Butler was overjoyed one day in April when she received a text message that her lost cat, Brooklyn, had supposedly been found. Her roommate’s boyfriend had allegedly taken the cat and dumped him 30 minutes away in the Los Angeles suburbs the day prior.
Butler quickly posted a missing poster on social media, and she was driving around with her roommate searching for Brooklyn when a stranger sent her a photo. In it, he is sitting on a kitchen counter while being embraced by a girl.
“My baby is OK!” Butler exclaimed to her roommate. But if she wanted to get him back, the person said, she would have to pay money up front for Brooklyn’s purported temporary care. That’s when Butler sensed she was being scammed and began looking closer at the photo.
Brooklyn was posing the same way as he had in the picture Butler used for the missing poster. In both images, a Torani syrup bottle and a microwave can be seen in the background, except in the new photo, the label text was garbled, a classic sign that it was AI-generated. A disheartened Butler didn’t pay up. “I didn’t know people scammed for lost pets,” she says, noting she also didn’t report the incident to police because she wasn’t sure a crime had occurred. Four months later, Brooklyn is still missing.
The flood of fakes has been no easier on the creators of authentic content. The nonprofit We Animals has published the work of 175 photojournalists who have documented alleged animal abuse and other harms at farms, circuses, and scientific labs. The material can be shocking, which naturally invites skepticism, says Eva von Jagow, the group’s marketing manager. For instance, drone footage We Animals shared of rows and rows of hutches allegedly used to shelter calves separated from their moms on a dairy farm in Arizona looks almost too mesmerizingly perfect to be real.
In the past, people have claimed We Animals’ work is staged or photoshopped. It’s no surprise, then, that some viewers have begun accusing the group of relying on AI, even though it bans the photographers it works with from using the technology. “How to prove it’s not AI?” an Instagram user commented earlier this month on the dairy farm video.
To convince audiences that its content is authentic, We Animals expects it will have to start sharing behind-the-scenes clips and more details about the steps staffers take to verify submissions. It also plans to adopt technology that embeds the provenance and editing history of photographs and videos into digital files. Victoria de Martigny, the group’s director of visual content, says preserving trust is crucial, or else it could “open up the door to people questioning all of the work,” and “we don’t ever want to be in that position.”
Who wins when the line blurs?
Real, evocative images often pull on viewers’ heartstrings and are an important way for conservation and welfare projects to attract donations. But for the owners of AI slop accounts, synthetic imagery can be a convenient path to collecting likes and ad revenue. Since fakes are much cheaper to produce, they appear to be drowning out real clips in social feeds and search results, says Oscar Horta, a philosopher and leading animal activist who recently helped direct a short film on how AI could affect wildlife.
Horta says he is concerned about the far-fetched videos of animals he has seen online lately, such as wild animals being rescued during fires and floods. He worries the likely AI-generated content will lead people to question legitimate rescue tactics and hamper fundraising efforts for them in the future. That’s not ideal, particularly at a time when extreme weather events are becoming more common.
Inauthentic content could also inspire people to act dangerously, harming animals in the process. “There are deepfakes of polar bears drowning and people on boats coming and rescuing them,” Horta says, calling the scenes “ridiculous” and “unrepresentative of what it means to help animals.”
Attempts to stop the spread
Researchers have begun proposing ways to slow the creation and spread of AI-generated misinformation about animals. This month, Jeff Sebo, director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy at New York University, began pushing AI developers to incorporate language into their model guidelines that would discourage them from generating responses potentially harmful to animals.
The idea is to “emphasize the importance of staying grounded in evidence and reason” when it comes to the possible suffering of individual creatures, while also avoiding being “overly preachy, overly moralizing, or refusing reasonable user requests,” Sebo says.
New laws in California and the EU now also require the most popular AI image generators to embed invisible tags signaling that content was made by artificial intelligence. Social media platforms then have to use those tags to publicly label AI-generated pictures and videos.
Greater public awareness about AI and increasing access to verification tools could further restore trust. Features in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Meta AI can identify whether an image was generated by the respective chatbot. But most people don’t have the time to upload every animal photo or video they see to the tools, and there are limitations, including caps on the number of images someone can check. Integrating verification tools directly into messaging apps and web browsers and turning them on by default (with privacy protections in place, of course) could make them much more useful.
Life after the scam
Butler’s heartbreak may have been eased if her iPhone could have automatically warned that the first scammer’s picture of Brooklyn might be fake. About once a month, Butler says she gets another deepfake from someone else claiming to have found her cat. According to tests WIRED conducted, ChatGPT verified that it generated at least one of the images, which shows a purported Brooklyn eating in front of a doorstep. Using a 29-word prompt and the original photo of Brooklyn from the missing poster, WIRED was able to use ChatGPT to create a picture nearly identical to the scammer’s.
Butler can’t seem to escape from seeing AI-generated cat videos online. When one comes across her social media feeds, she blocks the user who posted it, but new accounts still keep showing up. She says she now spends more time in a Facebook group for artists who oppose AI with nearly 300,000 members. It’s become a new sanctuary, where she can enjoy art she reliably knows was created by humans as she awaits Brooklyn’s hopeful eventual return.
