It got everywhere. Ashland’s Procione was the international version of the Gubbio Lunch. Between newspaper, infoencer, personal profiles and catch-up pages raccoon photo lying on the ground drunk it got everywhere. Very briefly: a raccoon entered a raccoon at night liquor store in AshlandVirginia. He broke some bottles, drank their contents and was found the next morning in less than dignified conditions.
Animal videos and stories work still good on social media. Certain. Gone are the days when all you had to do to click was to sequence kittens rolling on the floor. Yet it is not difficult to find among contents suggested by the algorithm small videos built to tell the story story of an animal.
There’s just one problem. Often they are completely fake videos: they put together many clips and with a good voice over they create a story. Why? For the usual reason why one might seek interactions on social media: to build attention to capitalize on. The same mechanism we have already talked about with the Cat Slop trend.
My favorite series is about cats that put on horns: Cat Slop Abyss
The case of the baby monkey beaten by its mother
On TikTok there is a video arrived at 10 million views. It tells the story of a baby monkey. Probably a Rhesus macaque. We see sequences in which the child is beaten by his mother. And then you read it in the description that the protagonist of the video has decided to save him. We leave the video for you end of article. At that point a series of scenes begins in which we see the baby monkey living with a family made up of human beings.
A truly touching story. Beyond 400,000 likes. More than 2,000 comments. Users wonder if it is artificial intelligence. They insult the monkey’s mother. They compliment the humans who saved her. Another touching story, too bad too this is false.
And this time artificial intelligence has no role. Or at least. From the images we have seen it appears that it has not been used. It’s all setup. The user put it together several clipsprobably recovered on social media. If there are any doubts just see the profile of creationr who posted the video.
The user is called tribbledavis, ha 42,000 followers and it’s full of videos like that. The clips change but the story is always the same: a poor monkey saved from some oppression who finds himself living together with humans. If you search carefully you will find some variations. A baby rat saved from the street, one poor fox found on the street, the baby kangaroo breastfed in a pouch and also the chick fallen from the nest.
The problem of cognitive warfare
Content made with artificial intelligence. Content created with very clever editing. Content that is chopped into clips and then reposted endlessly. The videos that pop up in front of our screens every day are starting to have little to do with reality. At least for the AI you can set some filters for screen what we see.
For those mounted with different clips, however, there isn’t much to do. Every time we enter social media we we get into a cognitive war with the contents we see. And the target is always and only one: our attention. To be captured by any means.
