TikToks unknowing bunny song pits human creativity against AI illusion
Were you tricked by the video of a bunch of bunnies jumping on a trampoline on TikTok? Well, nearly 230 million people were — and plenty of those viewers had no idea that it was actually AI. In response, the creator who brought us the Punxsutawney Phil musical, @olivesongs11, wrote and recorded a 30-second song on day 576 of his ongoing project, where he writes a new song each day.
The unknowing bunny song on TikTok now has over 3.8 million views, 600,000 likes, and hundreds of comments like, "Bo Burnham! At The Disco" and "Wait until you see the bear on a trampoline. Spoiler: also AI."
The song goes like this:
There were bunnies that were jumping on a trampoline
And I just learned that they weren't real
If a bot can inhabit
An unknowing rabbit
It might manufacture the way you make me feel
How do I know that the sky's really sunny?
Sometimes it feels like your love is as real as
An unknowing bunny
The video has inspired covers and renditions, stop-motion videos, reactions, and a variety of other really cool human-made art. As one creator wrote on a TikTok video using the sound, "The fact that this song written about AI is going viral is incredibly healing. Especially because us as artists and songwriters are being threatened of our livelihoods due to the use of AI. And AI could never create something this unique with this much feeling."
As Mashable's Tim Marcin recently wrote about the influx of faux surveillance footage of animals, it "seems to be a new genre of AI slop." But give the internet slop, and creators might make porridge (is that a saying?).
