Russian slop becomes the newest AI plague

While there may be a new plague ready to hit the world because of Russian virus meddling, we will focus on the other Russian plague for the time being.. the plague giving us the newest form of AI slot that everyone is confusing with the Mandela effect of a movie that never existed because none of this is real….

Let’s explain..

Mandela effects have been around for, well, almost 20 years now. We’ve argued over whether the Berenstain Bears were actually the Berenstein Bears, whether Sinbad starred in a genie movie that apparently never existed, and whether the Fruit of the Loom logo ever had a cornucopia.

But now we have AI.

And things might start getting really confusing ..

For the past several days, an image and video of a strange-looking boy has been floating around Facebook, Reddit and social media. He has blonde hair, an elongated face, a creepy little smile and appears to be tap dancing like some sort of elf or fairy-tale character.

Personally, when I first saw it, I thought absolutely nothing of it. I figured it was a clip from some old movie I had never seen and just sort of scrolled on by—because, well, that’s what we do now. Short attention spans and all..

But apparently a whole lot of other people didn’t scroll on by.

They wanted to know what movie it was from.

Was this some bizarre 1970s or 1980s version of Rumpelstiltskin? Was it an old European children’s movie? A television show? A commercial? Something from the 1960s that had been sitting forgotten in the back of people’s memories for 50 years?

No.

It isn’t from anything like that at all..

People trying to identify the “movie” eventually traced the character back to an Instagram account posting AI-generated material from a user named Stroinaya..

Commenters who went searching for the source concluded that the strange little tap-dancing character wasn’t an actor from a forgotten movie at all. He was generated by AI.


Because people aren’t merely saying, “Oh, that looks like something I’ve seen before.” Some are convinced they have seen him before.

One commenter on Reddit said their mother remembered seeing the character when she was a little girl. Another immediately thought it must have been a strange Czech fairy-tale movie from the 1960s. Someone else said it looked like one of those weird Eastern European versions of Rumpelstiltskin. Others simply went searching for the movie because they assumed, naturally enough, that a movie existed.

It doesn’t.  It’s not any of tha

And maybe we’re getting our first taste of an entirely new kind of Mandela effect.

Traditional Mandela effects involve people collectively remembering something differently from the historical record. But AI introduces something we really haven’t had to deal with before: the ability to manufacture new old memories.

AI models are trained on enormous amounts of existing imagery and culture. So perhaps what we’re looking at isn’t a copy of one particular forgotten character, but a strange mixture of things that really did exist..the lighting of an old European fairy tale, a face that vaguely resembles an actor you’ve seen somewhere, the grain of 1970s film, costumes that look historically familiar, movements that remind you of children’s television.

Nothing about the character is real, yet almost everything about him feels familiar.

And our brains apparently don’t particularly like that distinction.

That’s what makes this more interesting to me than simply another example of “AI slop.” We’re entering an era where artificial intelligence isn’t just capable of creating fake photographs of things that never happened. It can create something that looks as though it existed before you were even born.

Something that looks like it should be sitting on a dusty VHS tape somewhere.

Something your brain looks at and says, Wait. I’ve seen this before.

And maybe you have.

Just not this.

That’s going to make the next 20 years of Mandela effects a hell of a lot more brain teasingly confusing …