By: Elliott Chu

If you use social media apps that feature video like TikTok or Instagram, you may have seen something weird coming up your feed. A person appears on screen, telling a story, but their face doesn’t quite move the way a real person does and what they’re saying might be outrageous. This video is created by AI generating the image and voice of a fake person that tells stories and does other random things.

Alisha Arora, a TikTok user, found out that her first watched TikTok video was AI generated. The first time she saw an AI storytelling video on her TikTok feed, it appeared to be a famous basketball player telling his story. “I actually thought it was real,” Alisha said in an interview with Kids News. “It’s hard to draw the line between what’s real and what’s fake.” Kids might be seeing these AI storytelling videos and are sometimes the subject of them, as some AI videos are narrated by characters that look and sound like children.

The AI videos can include everything from famous historical figures talking about their lives to fictional kids telling silly and sometimes disturbing stories. It is becoming increasingly important for users of social media apps to pay attention to what they’re watching, so as not to be misled.