A viral video that ‘revealed’ a popular TikTok user was actually an AI-generated avatar is a hoax, the creators have admitted.
Student and TikTok user Curt Skelton said the goal of the video, which showed him transform into young woman, ‘was never to trick people.’
In the video, Skelton — a 22-year-old male student from Los Angeles — says he’s really a 21-year-old female New Jersey visual effects artist called Zahra Hussain.
Hussain then describes how she ‘created’ the Skelton avatar by animating an image generated with AI software DALL-E.
Hussein says she generated Skelton’s appearance with the prompt: ‘Conan O’Brien and Matt Smith had a son 22 years old.’
Posted to Skelton’s account on Thursday, the video quickly went viral, reaching 14.1 million views on Tuesday.
It prompted concern from many users – and scepticism from others — that a year’s worth of videos on Skelton’s page were in fact a hoax.
But in an interview with Input magazine, Skelton admitted he was a real person — and not an avatar created by Hussain.
He told the publication the pair had created the video as a lighthearted response to the concerns of visual effects artists who fear AI technology may threaten jobs in their industry.
‘I’ve always loved the idea of AI being used in art, but what got my attention lately was all the artists worried that they’ll be put out of a job directly because of it,’ he told Input.
‘Nobody got the original joke of the video,’ he added, ‘which probably means it wasn’t a good joke. But when I say, ‘Will AI replace the role of VFX artists? It already has,’ you’d expect me to talk about how it’s replacing jobs, not the literal VFX artist.’
Even if the joke didn’t land, the stunt still saw Skelton gain more than 100,000 followers over the weekend, as well as a ‘like’ from serial tech entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk.
It also prompted numerous followers to trawl through his other social media accounts to try and figure out once and for all if the video was a hoax.
Others expressed relief AI technology had not created such a convincing character.
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