An elderly Malaysian couple recently made a trip from KL to a small area in Perak called Kampung Kuak Hulu, all in the hopes to ride a new cable car service there. Sadly, when they got there and asked the hotel lobby about it, they were told that such an attraction did not exist, and when they showed the video of the “attraction” to the hotel concierge, they were told that they’d been victims of a fake AI generated video.
The elderly couple, who checked in on 30 June, said they first saw the AI generated video of the “Kuak Skyride” and that the attraction was what brought them to the area in the first place. The original video, which is believed to have been made using Google Veo 3, has since been taken down due to the controversy but thankfully, it’s been reuploaded by several YouTubers with warnings of its nature.
The AI generated video is just a little three minutes long and right from the start you can how things fail to add up. For starters, a quick Google search would tell you that there’s no such station in Malaysia called TV Rakyat. Second, from the start of the video clip to finish, the “reporter” is seen wearing a down jacket. It’s Malaysia and again, a quick search on Google will inform that temperatures in Kuak Hulu hit 32°C on average.
There are, of course, other tell-tale signs of the AI generated video’s authenticity. A blank license plate of the vehicle, which is highly illegal; spatterings of spelling mistakes; AI hallucinations on the alleged “Waze” app; an overly enthusiastic interviewee whose jaws looks like it’s about to dislocate when he speaks; and a tourist group from “Thailand”, one of whom speaks fluent Malay without even a hint of the Thai accent.
The list of unbelievable horse dung continues with an antique shop located on-site, with products that are on sale for interested parties; a building perched on the cliff of one of the area’s mountains that seems way too high; and a restaurant that seems to have a penchant of oversuing the misting machine. But the ultimate sign of the AI generated video’s fakeness, is the backflipping “makcik” at the end of the video, which is also AI hallucinated.
There are two takeaways to be had from this. Firstly, the level of realism in AI generated videos has now reached unbelievable levels that, if you weren’t paying attention to the finer details, they’d pass off as the real thing. Second, and in conjunction with that point, it’s not an exaggeration to say that this trend is getting out of hand.
