Bloomberg Businessweek (October 2025)

Год выпуска: October, 2025

Автор: Bloomberg Businessweek

Жанр: Бизнес

Издательство: «Bloomberg Businessweek»

Формат: PDF (журнал на английском языке)

Качество: OCR

Количество страниц: 108

The AI Takeover of Social Media

Unable to sleep one evening this summer, Andy Kosovskiy started tinkering with Google’s recently released video creation tool, Veo 3. The result might have helped usher in a new age for social media—and perhaps for the entire business of entertainment.

Kosovskiy, a 22-year-old marketing professional from New York, wanted to test his skills while indulging his curiosity about new artificial intelligence tools that can turn a few sentences of instruction into realistic-looking short videos. Reflecting on the timeless appeal of cute, furry animals, as well as his generation’s insatiable attraction to unscripted moments caught on camera, he entered a few prompts along the lines of: Create a grainy nighttime security video of a pack of wild rabbits bouncing on a wooded backyard trampoline. To spark discussion and tip the invisible hand of AI, he added: “bunnies are jumping and one disappears.”

He posted the eight-second clip to TikTok late on July 26 under the profile “rachelthecatlovers.” The caption read: “Just checked the home security cam and … I think we’ve got guest performers out back!” The internet did the rest. Over the next few weeks, it was viewed 237 million times (roughly double the live audience of the Super Bowl). Thousands of armchair sleuths took to the comments section to debate its authenticity and the improbable physics of how six bunnies suddenly became five. Kosovskiy watched it all with a sense that monumental change was coming for Hollywood. “This is just a starting point,” he says. “I think of this like the Industrial Revolution. It’s democratizing creation.”

Bouncing bunnies, talking gorillas, babies being interviewed—if you’ve recently killed time on Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube, you probably noticed that AI-generated clips have proliferated. Critics call it “AI slop,” unimaginative dreck characterized by anthropomorphized animals and lame jokes. But that ignores the basics: The videos look pretty good, tend to get lots of views and shares, and cost creators next to nothing to produce. “You can’t deny how amazing and enabling a technology this is,” says Hany Farid, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley and founder of the deepfake detection company GetReal Security. “Think about what the average teenager has access to now. You don’t need multimillion-dollar budgets, sets or actors. You just need your imagination.”

All this has happened rather suddenly. Advances in machine-learning algorithms, processing power and large language models from Google, OpenAI and other companies have made it easier and faster to convert the odd inspiration into a video clip. Google released Veo 3 in May. It costs $6 to create an eight-second video and can now generate sound effects and convert a script into spoken dialogue, with characters’ lips moving realistically as they’re speaking. The improvements are stark: In 2023 an AI-generated video of actor Will Smith eating spaghetti—for some reason an important benchmark for AI progress—was glitchy and unrealistic.

A similar video this year looks so good it will make you hungry.

Creators are making use of these improvements. Jonathan Punski is the oldest of four brothers in Montreal who run a social networking company for pet owners called DogPack. This past July, inspired by the inexplicable trend of AI-generated social videos that feature a talking yeti, they started posting videos of dogs in a podcast studio trading quips about their owners and laughing. The humor is dad-joke cringe. (Labrador: “They always ask the obvious questions, like, ‘Do you want a treat?’ Do you think I’m sitting for fun?”) But the brothers now have a few hundred thousand followers on TikTok and Instagram and are taking requests from owners of online-famous dogs such as Walter Geoffrey the French bulldog to add the likeness of their pets to the so-called Pawdcast. “People got bored of seeing nice cars, nice watches, people bragging on social media about how much money they make,” says Punski, who adds that the videos are an inexpensive way to funnel new customers to the DogPack app. “They want to be entertained. And now you can get dogs to talk.”

Many of these videos feel designed to hook a viewer and spread virally, such as the historically dubious AI re-creations of Pompeii before the volcanic eruption or visions of ancient Romans exploring the stars on spaceships. Much of it is silly and repetitive: videos of people leaping onto beds made of cheese or chocolate, or clips of the planets being spread like jam on toast.

Some creators admit their videos are meant to entice social media algorithms and earn money from Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, which pay for original videos that capture users’ attention for more than a few seconds. “You gotta play with people’s psychology,” says Ali Sultan, a 27-year-old from Lahore, Pakistan, who’s responsible for the food-bed mashups on TikTok. “It’s clickbait.”

Other AI creators are mischievously stomping on Hollywood’s prized intellectual property. Kabir Rajdev, a 13-year-old from New York, began toying with AI in his spare time this summer and using Veo 3 to make videos starring the stormtroopers from Star Wars, who call each other “bro” and narrate their own misadventures. Kabir, who produced a few dozen videos, says he uses ChatGPT to write scripts and suggest hashtags, then gets Veo 3 to generate the clips; he edits them into longer videos and selects the best ones to upload. The videos all have thousands of views and rapturous comments (“way better than Disney”). His father, Rohit, says his son scored three sponsorships and earned about $1,500. They haven’t received any hostile letters from Walt Disney Co.’s Lucasfilm (which didn’t reply to a request for comment).

Once upon a time, Hollywood had a lock on making mainstream entertainment. Silicon Valley scion David Ellison wants to continue that tradition and recently combined his company, Skydance Media, with Paramount Global in an industry-shaking $8 billion merger (page 42). YouTubers such as Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, and children’s content creator Ms. Rachel have started to loosen the studios’ grip on our attention (pages 54 and 50). Still, some clever filmmakers are embracing AI; one company, backed by Amazon.com Inc., says it plans to use it to reconstruct the missing footage from The Magnificent Ambersons, lost when the studio took control of its editing from Orson Welles.

The social media companies also have a duty to patrol this new landscape. Although many AI videos are harmless fun, deepfakes are aimed at deceiving users—such as the clip last spring of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy seemingly instructing his troops to surrender. It’s easy to imagine a wave of manipulative AI videos aimed at swaying elections, rigging sports betting markets and wreaking untold havoc and confusion on society.

Instagram, TikTok and other sites currently ask creators to voluntarily click a box labeling their videos as AI-generated. (Kosovskiy, maker of the trampoline bunnies, says he missed that option at first and only added it later.) The sites have a “bare minimum responsibility” to automatically identify and tag AI videos, as well as to investigate and banish users creating deepfakes, says Sahana Udupa, a professor of media anthropology at LMU Munich. “AI-generated videos can carry brazen lies and hate-filled vitriol as text- and image-based online discourses have been doing even before AI image generators became en vogue,” she says.

Tech companies and their regulators in the US haven’t seemed particularly interested in labeling or moderating content lately. What they really like is high user engagement and the advertising revenue it attracts. So we’re probably just going to have to hold our collective breath, hope for the best and try to enjoy those bouncing bunnies.

Remarks

• Get ready to see a lot more bunnies on trampolines

In Context

• The sickening crisis at the CDC
• Korean companies are paying employees to procreate
• Why Main Street banks fear stablecoins
• Jaba juice, East Africa’s buzzy khat concoction
• A Walk With: Axel Springer’s Mathias Döpfner

In View

• How CEOs get on Trump’s good side (Hint: Gold leaf)
• Are all those better-for-you snacks any better for you?
• The CPI doesn’t tell the whole inflation story

B-Schools

• Businessweek ranks the best MBA programs of 2025
• Degrees aren’t worth what they used to be
• MIT Sloan’s idealistic new dean on the value of people

Screentime

• Meet some media moguls in the making
• David Ellison got his Paramount merger. Now what?
• What Ms. Rachel’s “advocacy era” looks like
• MrBeast’s latest stunt: Bringing in adult supervision
• American movies lose their grip on the global box office
• It’s hard finding—and keeping—a job in Hollywood
• Enron is back! Sort of
• The artists and execs reshaping the creator economy
• How Stellantis drove Jeep into a ditch

Pursuits

• Is the electric bodysuit a perfect get-fit cheat?
• Ear Xanax, nostril scaffolds and other wellness hacks
• Fighting midlife malaise with injectable peptides
• A word of caution about that ketamine nasal spray
• CEO Diet: Productivity tools the boss relies on
• Top restaurant dishes are coming out tasting like roses
• Chanel’s sensuous J12 wristwatch, now in brilliant bleu
• When the barkeep takes over the boutique hotel
• A cinematic era of anxiety, paranoia and conspiracies
• What you’ll want to watch, read and look at this fall
• Two German art giants return to the fore

Last Thing

• Introducing Alphadots, Bloomberg’s latest brain-breaker

скачать журнал: Bloomberg Businessweek (October 2025)