This morning I got this youtube short in my feed, showing barnacles being removed from a whale at sea. Finally something good happening!
But I found the scenario surprising enough to google a bit into it…and of course it’s AI.
Watching again, knowing it is not real, the only thing I can see is that the bit where the barnacles are coming off is too much, and the brush is different for the different shots.
But yeah, March 14th 2025, the start of me losing contact with reality…
First clue, the brush keeps changing length. The water looks too smooth, almost oily.
How do you train the whales to do this?
The abrupt cascade of barnacles rather than a constant stream. The size of the barnacles coming off are far larger than the barnacles on the whale.
Well I did say a couple of those things. And I would separate the scenario (how does the whale initially know it is something for its benefit) from the signs in the video itself.
Because if it comes to the point where we only know its not real by what is happening, then it’s cold comfort. It means we could be fooled about something more mundane (I dunno, dangerous driving say).
Anyway, I don’t know why I’m getting defensive, the whole thread is my own public “D’oh!” 
Yeah, I didn’t read through your post. I wanted to see what I could spot on my own. I think the most immediately obvious is the brush changing length.
Ah right.
I’m also thinking the brush is too blurred for the speed that it’s spinning, but of course in itself this isn’t much, because real spinning objects sometimes have weird looking motion blur, due to the frame rate of the video plus a couple optical illusions.
Fair play for coming in to share this.
Forewarned, I can see some elements -the brush, and the way some of the barnacles sprayed - that look a bit off, but that’s because I was looking for them.
This will happen to us all at some point. Honestly, it may have happened to me already. You were a) fooled and then b) unfooled yourself. I wouldn’t like to swear that I haven’t achieved step a) without step b) by now.
And of course the only defense is to treat all videos and pictures with extreme skepticism from now on. Which if nothing else is frankly tedious, and in a “bad money drives out good” way, reduces the value of real imagery.
I’d seen this one earlier. There are several AI tells, one I think not yet mentioned is the brush being attached to two crane arms at various points, but I thought the greatest tell is just: why? Why would anybody invest considerable time and money and scrape barnacles of whales? I mean, they’re not harmful at all, are they?
But I’m near certain that I’ve been taken in by various fake videos and images. Really, if anything, then coming back to examine the footage for tells just shows you how much of any imagery just never really enters into your perception.
I don’t mind humorous AI videos online—some are downright clever. And I’m not too bothered about AI-generated clips pretending to be real; the giveaways are usually obvious—oversaturated colors, hyper-sharp details, or the occasional shape-shifting limb. But what does bother me is the sheer flood of AI-generated videos clogging social media. It’s getting harder to find real footage in the sea of digital imitations. When I search for “funny cat videos,” I want to see actual cats—whiskers, chaos, and all—not some uncanny valley abominations with glitchy fur and dead eyes.
My first thought, and this is watching the video after having read the thread title, is why? Do whales get covered in barnacles? Is it a problem for them? Is it a problem to the point that it requires humans to step in and help?
Yes, as part of the googling I also found that they are not a bother to whales at all. Only in some rare cases where a whale has been injured or sick and a lot have accumulated, but even then they all eventually fall off, so if the whale gets better their number will return to normal.
That said, motivation-wise I think it’s on the edge of believable. Because even if the barnacles don’t bother the whale it might feel good to have them removed. And in terms of the humans, I’d be willing to do this.
Whales do get encrusted with barnacles, but it’s more of a nuisance to them than a health issue. Too many barnacles create drag and slow whales down. And, they can irritate the skin. But, whales don’t need human intervention, they know how to deal with them on their own (rubbing against objects or other whales, breaching and slapping them off, etc.). Whales ain’t dumb.
Stranger
I wish there was an effective way to search Facebook reels. Yesterday I saw an AI video of a woman washing a huge atoxyl that impressed me, especially the degree of consistency of the appearance of the rather homely woman between shots.
A few days before that a video of someone playing with a weird sort of blobfish-like creature. That one I recognized as this cat video with the cat morphed into the thing
And another recent one that was obviously a different cat/small dog video altered, though I didn’t remember the source. The AI for animating photos or altering videos is getting pretty sophisticated. One of the bigger clues is that the clip will be made up of a number of shots that are only a few seconds each (a technical limitations that will go away).
FB will probably feed me the mentioned videos again. When it does, I’ll link them.
For awhile I was seeing a lot of these “cleaning barnacles off of whales” shorts getting pushed into my feed. Some of them get quite ridiculous. I actually saw one of people cleaning barnacles off of a giraffe! Surely that had to be a deliberate joke? Didn’t it?
I was afraid to read the comments to see how many people believed it was real.
Barnacles don’t even mess with a giraffe’s waterhole pals—hippos—since they can’t survive in freshwater.
Hive needs to up their game and add video checking to the AI-Generated Content Detector app; I just noticed the website already has that capability but the app version doesn’t.
With the exception of a few accounts which tag their images as ai and a few other accounts which I know don’t post anything other than AI-generated images, I check all suspect images which pop up in my Facebook feed. Text, too, if the image accompanies a recipe. Whole lotta fake recipes out there.
And I found it. Turns out it was posted in one of the AI groups and not “in the wild” trying to fool anyone though.
That’s done automatically—by AI. (I’ve seen false positives and negatives for it, too.)
I’m starting to suspect that there really isn’t going to be a Groundhog Day sequel.