A video is circulating on social media in which a leopard enters the backyard of a house where a child is playing, and a cat confronts the leopard and scares it away, protecting the child. The video has garnered over a million “likes” and has been shared more than 15,000 times.

Another series of videos shows bears or deer jumping on a trampoline in a backyard. In another, three raccoons float down a river riding on three crocodiles. All of these videos are created by artificial intelligence, and thanks to their high degree of realism, appear to be real.

Given the proliferation of these types of videos and the lack of research on this topic in scientific literature, researchers from the GESBIO group at the University of Cordoba—José Guerrero, Francisco Sánchez, Antonio Carpio, Rocío Serrano, and Tamara Murillo—have spotlighted this issue, analyzing the different consequences that these AI-generated videos have on the knowledge and conservation of wild species.