‘Emotional Support Kangaroo' Video Goes Viral—But It's Completely Fake

Forbes

5 days ago

The viral "emotional support kangaroo" posted by Infinite Unreality
Infinite Unreality/Instagram
You might have seen an unusual sight on your social media timeline lately—a clip of a woman trying to board a plane with her 'emotional support kangaroo,' arguing passionately with a stewardess.
The clip ends with the camera zooming into the kangaroo's face, sparking questions. Who gave it an airplane ticket? Why isn't it eating the ticket? Are emotional support kangaroos a thing now?
Of course, the video is fake—in fact, it's completely AI-generated.
The kangaroo clip was originally posted on Instagram by a visual effects artist known as 'Infinite Unreality.'
This account regularly posts surreal AI-generated videos, most of them featuring Infinite Unreality's logo, the infinity symbol, which can also be spotted in the kangaroo clip.
If there is a niche for AI-generated art, perhaps it makes sense to lean into the uncanny and unsettling, as this plays to the strengths of the technology.
In the case of the emotional support kangaroo, the video proved just weird enough to gain attention, but not weird enough to be immediately flagged as AI.
After being posted on Instagram, the clip was reposted by DramaAlert to X (Twitter), where it was viewed more than 58 million times, according to X's metrics.
Many internet users assumed the clip was real, and it's not hard to see why. After all, the internet is constantly collecting the weirdest moments of the real world, and people are especially weird when it comes to their pets.
Several users turned the close-up of the cute, confused-looking kangaroo into a meme, seemingly without noticing that the animal was fully AI-generated.
Without inspecting too closely, the video seems like just another strange crumb of content on the timeline. If one ignores the fact that the kangaroo is holding a little plane ticket, it's not a particularly uncanny clip.
The fact that videos on X are automatically muted helped launch this particular clip into virality, as the sound quickly exposes the artifice—the two women in the clip are speaking in a nonsensical language.
This appears to be intentional on the part of the video's creator, as today's video-generating tools are capable of generating decent audio that roughly matches the visual output.
What's really striking about the AI-generated emotional support kangaroo is how easily it slips into the ambient noise of the internet, just another one of those silly stories we all constantly see on our timelines.
Previously, I wrote about how Google's new video-generating tool, Veo 3, had attained photorealism, measured by the ability to generate a convincing clip of Will Smith eating spaghetti.
It used to be fairly easy to spot AI-generated content, and if you look carefully, many of the clues are still there. The more Veo 3 clips one encounters, the easier it is to see the uncanny movements and oddities.
Overall, however, the clues have greatly diminished, and in some of the clips, they just aren't there at all.
A boundary has been crossed, and the ability to generate a short video clip that is indistinguishable from real footage is now possible.
Just like how the viral, AI-generated Balenciaga Pope ushered in a new era of AI-generated imagery that now swamps the internet, the emotional support kangaroo is the first viral video created by AI.
It's hard to predict where things go from here—issues such as disinformation, non-consensual pornography and scams are almost certainly going to get much worse—but there's no way to tell how social media will be altered by the ability to create convincing footage from nothing.
The internet is surely going to become stranger, even more detached from reality than it already is—the emotional support kangaroo is just the beginning.