A photo of a lost fox roaming the fields outside the town of Rabat sparked a series of copycat AI-generated videos showing similar foxes in different localities, causing confusion and frustration among animal activists.
On Sunday January 3, animal activist Christa Cilia posted a grainy photo of what appeared to be a domesticated silver fox spotted roaming in a country lane in the vicinity of Rabat.
The widely shared photo posted by Cilia was genuine, with several people describing how they too had spotted the fox while in Rabat or one of its neighbouring hamlets. Cilia herself later told Times of Malta that although she had not taken the photo herself, she had come across the escaped fox while visiting the site.
However, pranksters seized on the opportunity, creating a series of AI-generated videos of foxes in roaming across different Maltese towns and posting them to prominent local Facebook groups.
One post featured AI-generated videos of a brown fox in the countryside, accompanied by the caption “Fox roaming in the fields, Rabat area. Pay attention!”. Another post purported to show a similar fox in Valletta’s Upper Barrakka gardens.
The fake videos have since been taken down, but not before being widely shared on the afternoon of Sunday January 3, blurring the line between truth and fiction and sowing doubt over what is real and what is a figment of AI.
After seeing the fake videos, many appear to have assumed that the photo posted by Cilia was also the work of artificial intelligence.
“I think this is a joke, you can do anything with AI these days,” one person said beneath Cilia’s post.
“Guys, it was an AI generated video,” added another.
People commenting on other Facebook posts of the silver fox expressed similar scepticism, with many claiming it was AI-generated.
Activists say the scepticism undermined efforts to trace the fox, driving them to painstakingly inform their followers that the image is genuine.
“For those thinking that this is AI, you are wrong,” Cilia wrote beneath her initial post. “The videos being uploaded by someone who has time to waste on (Facebook group) Are You Being Served? are AI”.
Other activists shared Cilia’s post adding a caption stressing that the image is “not AI”.
On Tuesday January 6, Cilia told Times of Malta of her frustration at the confusion caused by the AI-generated videos.
“It’s unusual to see a fox in Malta, so we had to waste precious time reassuring people that the photo was real,” she said.
“Eventually, AI begins to win and people start believing AI more than they believe reality,” she added.
“This is a problem when an animal’s life is involved because it makes rescue efforts more difficult.”
Cilia believes that, as of Tuesday afternoon, the fox is still on the loose.
Although several other AI-generated videos of animals roaming Malta’s streets have been posted to social media in recent months, this marks one of the clearest instances to date of a fake video disrupting rescue efforts.
The rapid improvement in generative AI tools, such as video and image generators, has renewed fears of their contribution to online misinformation and a loss of faith in verified information.
Most local cases of AI deepfakes to date have sought to use the likeness of public figures in an effort to promote a scam, although others, such as AI expert Alexiei Dingli, are using AI avatars to educate the public about artificial intelligence.
Further afield, AI-generated images and videos can be expected to sprout around any major news story, such as the recent capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, predictably accompanied by a series of AI-generated images of Maduro detained by US Army officials.
Efforts to control the spread of fake images and videos and tag them as AI-generated are still in their infancy.
Google, whose recent release of image and video generator Nano Banana marks the latest development in the field, has recently introduced digital watermarks in its AI-generated content which will allow Gemini to flag it as AI-generated, but only if it was created using Google’s proprietary tools.
Nevertheless, experts warn, this verification still puts the onus on users to manually verify images and videos themselves, rather than having social media platforms automatically flag content as AI-generated.
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After an activist posted a genuine picture of a silver fox (left), a series of AI-generated fox videos appeared on Facebook
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