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Great Job, Internet!: Learn how to identify AI videos with Jeremy Carrasco

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AI has advanced to a place where we can no longer rely on people having weird numbers of fingers or unhinging their jaws in horrifying ways to distinguish a real video from a fake one. For every obviously artificial clip of Donald Trump dousing protesters in shit, there’s relatively innocuous videos of an unwanted animal in a family’s yard or two people having a meet-cute on the subway that trip more people up. But there’s someone out there who can help. If you ever find yourself wondering whether you just got got by a clip of someone falling off of Mount Everest or a cat freaking out in a bathtub, just check out Jeremy Carrasco’s Instagram page

Carrasco has become one of the internet’s preeminent AI video spotters. Having worked for a long time in the media industry as both a director and technical producer, Carrasco told The A.V. Club that he started picking out AI videos because he “knew what a huge range of typical ‘traditional’ errors looked like, and the AI ones stuck out to me as unique.” Eventually, he said, he developed an eye and language for it.

On his Instagram page, Carrasco uses those skills to talk through all the granular reasons he can tell viral videos are (or aren’t) AI. For a video about a possum stealing Halloween candy, for example, he directs his audience to look for evidence that a watermark from OpenAI’s Sora video generator had been removed, as well as a number of other tells including magically appearing candy and the fact that the possum looks away from a scary Halloween decoration when it gets startled because “AI mixes up directions.”

Carrasco sent The A.V. Club five general tips for spotting AI generated videos:

1. Watermarks: The Sora app lets users generate Sora 2 AI videos for free, but there is a watermark on top. Since this is so popular, you will still see watermarks on many AI videos. However, there are watermark removers, which leave a blemish on the video on the top or sides. Most AI videos don’t have a watermark at all—Sora is the exception.

2. Formats with blurry cameras: Since Sora 2 has a noisy or staticky image, most of the viral videos using Sora 2 so far are from AI versions of security cameras, Ring doorbell cameras, police body cameras, or even action cameras. People have more tolerance for noisy images in these formats. This was also the case for Google Veo videos—think of the trampoline AI videos!

3. Check video source: Many AI videos stretch reality, rage bait you, or are very bizarre. Meta-analyzing videos is becoming more important. Why does this video exist? What does the creator want me to feel? Then check their page. You’re looking for reliable and consistent content from a page that has frequent characters, or verified creators or news organizations. Be wary of repost accounts or accounts with the same format over and over; many AI creators find one viral format and repeat it with slight modifications.

4. Look for typical tells: Background issues like blurry or smudgy objects, poor spatial reasoning, and very noisy or wobbly textures. Look directly into the eyes of human subjects—does it look real or does it feel uncanny? While hands and limbs are mostly sorted and you’re unlikely to see 6 fingers, just look around to see what feels off. AI videos are often too well lit for the scenario and have a smooth look, but this is changing too.

5. Learn with the obvious ones: I point out AI videos of animals or harmless videos because it can train your brain to see subconscious tells. For example, while a video frame rate and blurry image can be difficult for the average person to explain, there are subconscious tells that become apparent after watching enough. This can prepare you for if and when more misleading or harmful videos use AI.

Carrasco still has faith that “most people don’t want to watch AI generated videos, especially when they feel like they’re being tricked.” “The general population seems to understand it’s not good for their feeds and want to keep a grip on reality,” he continued. “Short-term, the increasing quality of AI videos has made people lose confidence in their ability to figure out what’s real, which can lead to cynicism and detachment. Long-term, this projects out to disinformation and distrust. While it may seem like a stretch to go from AI bunnies to political deepfakes, the slow normalization of deepfakes from Sora and synthetic media in general is pushing us further from what was good about the internet in the first place.” Carrasco can be found on Instagram and YouTube under the username @showtoolsai.



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InShaneee
11 hours ago
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The Sims Mobile is Shutting Down Next Year

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The Sims is in a period of transition -- and as part of that, the ongoing mobile version will be shutting down in a few months. From a report: EA announced that today's update for The Sims Mobile will be its last, and that on January 20th, 2026 the game "will no longer be accessible to play and will be sunset." The mobile iteration of the franchise first launched in 2018, and has seen more than 50 updates since then. EA says that starting today players will no longer be able to spend real money in the game, and that it will be delisted on both iOS and Android tomorrow before the servers shut down completely next year, making it entirely unplayable.

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InShaneee
18 hours ago
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AWS Outage Takes Thousands of Websites Offline for Three Hours

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AWS experienced a three-hour outage early Monday morning that disrupted thousands of websites and applications across the globe. The cloud computing provider reported DNS problems with DynamoDB in its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia starting at 12:11 a.m. Pacific time. Over 4 million users reported issues, according to Downdetector. Snapchat saw reports spike from more than 22,000 to around 4,000 as systems recovered. Roblox dropped from over 12,600 complaints to fewer than 500. Reddit and the financial platform Chime remained affected longer. Perplexity, Coinbase and Robinhood attributed their platform disruptions directly to AWS. Gaming platforms including Fortnite, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans went offline. Signal confirmed the messaging app was down. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the HMRC website faced problems. United Airlines reported disrupted access to its app and website overnight. Some internal systems were temporarily affected. Delta experienced a small number of minor flight delays. By 3:35 a.m. Pacific time, AWS said the issue had been fully mitigated. Most service operations were succeeding normally though some requests faced throttling during final resolution. AWS holds roughly one-third of the cloud infrastructure market ahead of Microsoft and Google.

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InShaneee
18 hours ago
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WWE to bodyslam the human spirit, transition into "AI-based storytelling"

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Long-running wrestling outfit the WWE has revealed its intention to enter a new era of “AI-based storytelling.” Per a report in the Wrestling Observer, the entertainment company recently hired former Buzzfeed guy Cyrus Kowsari to serve as its new senior director of creative strategy, i.e., the guy whose job it will be to cram artificial intelligence into every inch and crevice of WWE’s creative singlet.

Kowsari—who also spent several years at MMA company ONE—was introduced to WWE staffers back in September by chief creative officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque, who called him someone who would lead the company into an “inevitable” “transition into AI-based storytelling,” as well as fronting a push to “integrate AI into creative services like video and graphics.” The latter of which, we can kind of get: If you’re not that worried about things like quality, respecting copyright, or the environment, AI can crap out a lot of graphics really quickly. But the idea of letting AI write storylines for what is still one of the planet’s biggest wrestling promotions feels aggressively silly, especially when we’re talking about a form of entertainment that has had to fight off years of allegations that its storytelling was slapdash and inconsistent.

Among other things, the Wrestling Observer piece cites reporting from the site’s own Dave Meltzer, who wrote in his regular wrestling newsletter that recent attempts by WWE to use writing AI to generate storyline ideas produced unusable nonsense, with the models having little ability to keep track of, say, which wrestlers actually worked for the company. Again, you probably could filter through the massive amounts of garbage you’d get with this approach to find a usable idea created by jamming together five old ones. Which feels ridiculously harder than just stocking a writers room with a small collection of people who actually know the company’s output. But, hey, what do we know? We’ve never even suplexed one person through a folding table. Maybe this really is the future of wrestling.



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InShaneee
2 days ago
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Amazon's Ring Partners With Flock, a Network of AI Cameras Used By Police

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Amazon's Ring has announced a partnership with Flock Safety, the AI-powered camera network already used by ICE, the Secret Service, and other federal agencies. "Now agencies that use Flock can request that Ring doorbell users share footage to help with 'evidence collection and investigative work,'" reports TechCrunch. From the report: Flock cameras work by scanning the license plates and other identifying information about cars they see. Flock's government and police customers can also make natural language searches of their video footage to find people who match specific descriptions. However, AI-powered technology used by law enforcement has been proven to exacerbate racial biases. On the same day that Ring announced this partnership, 404 Media reported that ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy had access to Flock's network of cameras. By partnering with Ring, Flock could potentially access footage from millions more cameras.

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InShaneee
3 days ago
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R.I.P. Tomonobu Itagaki, creator of Dead Or Alive video game series

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Tomonobu Itagaki, the influential video game designer known for Dead Or Alive and 2004’s Ninja Gaiden, has died. Rarely seen in public without his black sunglasses that gave the gaming auteur a rockstar energy, Itagaki posted “Last Words” on Facebook, a pre-written statement on his passing. His friend James Mielke confirmed Itagaki’s death on Bluesky. He was 58.

The post reads:

The light of my life is finally fading.

The fact that this message has been posted means that the time has

finally come. I am no longer in this world.

(I’m asking a loved one to make this final post.)

My life has been a series of battles. I kept winning.

I’ve caused a lot of trouble, too.

I’m proud to say that I followed my beliefs and fought to the end.

I have no regrets.

However, I’m filled with regret that I wasn’t able to deliver a

new work to all my fans. I’m sorry.

That’s just how it is.

So, it goes.

Born April 1, 1967, in Tokyo, Itagaki started working in video games in 1992 after graduating from law school. He arrived at Tecmo that year, working as a graphics programmer on the American version of Tecmo Super Bowl. Early success led him up the ladder at Tecmo, where he founded his own division, which would later be known as Team Ninja, in 1995. The following year, Team Ninja had its first hit, Dead Or Alive, a fast-paced fighting game that stood out from the Virtua Fighters of its time by being more violent and sexually provocative. The game spawned numerous sequels and spin-offs, including 2003’s bikini-based franchise starter, Dead Or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. In 2004, Team Ninja released Ninja Gaiden, a graphically violent reboot of the 1988 arcade and NES game, to great acclaim.

Itagaki resigned from Tecmo ahead of the release of 2008’s Ninja Gaiden II. He sued the company over unpaid bonuses and its president for making “unreasonable and disingenuous statements” in front of his colleagues, causing him “emotional distress and worsening my personal relationships and work environment.” After his departure, Itagaki’s output slowed. His final game as director, Devil’s Third, arrived in 2015.



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InShaneee
4 days ago
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