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Digital media allow you to watch all sorts of things, such as animals in rather strange situations. The appearance of a particular animal in some short videos on one of these channels is essentially identical to the illustration in Alfred Brehm’s book on page 569 (“The Animal Kingdom According to Brehm,” 1957) and the animal in the French documentary “The Snow Leopard” from 2022. That is why I am certain that the animals featured on this internet channel were snow leopards.

The snow leopard is a very shy big cat found in the high mountains of Central Asia. In the short videos, however, there is very close contact between humans and snow leopards—not only through eye contact, but also through physical contact. A person frees a young snow leopard from plastic waste in which the animal’s neck is stuck. The older animal stands nearby, seemingly watching calmly. This is not only highly unlikely, but in the scene shown, it is virtually impossible. A snow leopard in the wild would never allow such contact to occur.

At first, I was surprised by the filming scene. I had some doubts—the scenes couldn’t be real. But I wasn’t sure exactly how they were filmed. Short films of this kind were frequently available to watch on that channel. Eventually, the penny dropped. It had to be, almost certainly, the use of artificial intelligence—which was still very novel just a few years ago—since traditional manipulation techniques are far too labor-intensive.

The snow leopard is a very rare animal. It is constantly on the brink of extinction. Who is driving the snow leopard to extinction? Well, who else? Humans, among other things, by hunting it for various reasons. I believe the snow leopard is officially protected, but what good does that do it? Its habitat is shrinking year by year, just like that of so many other animal species.

We won’t dwell here on the possible motives behind the production of these short videos. One generally positive motive would be the protection of species. Incidentally, the newts in our few forest ponds and small pools are also protected by nature conservation laws, which also carry criminal penalties in our state.

During subsequent visits to this website, I came across a man who makes and sells shoes. My attempts to contact him have gone unanswered—at least so far. But I’m slowly beginning to wonder whether this man with the shoes and the man working at a loom are even real people at all, or just AI-generated characters. I still believe they’re real. I still have hope that I’ll get a reply at some point.

In a few years at the latest, hardly anyone will be able to distinguish the real from the fake immediately and without a doubt. This is especially true if you’ve grown up surrounded by fake things. The problem won’t be limited to snow leopards and shoe manufacturers. How will young and very young people distinguish the real from the fake if they’ve been consuming manipulated content from an early age?

In theory, everything can be manipulated using digital technology. The emphasis is on the word “everything,” not on the word “theoretically.” Everything that can be displayed on a screen can be falsified. Every point on a screen—known as a pixel—can be controlled via internal addressing and its color can be changed. Any image in the digital world is composed of a finite number of these pixels. A digital image can be as large as you like, but the number of pixels is always limited in some way. The same is true for images in print media. Digital just happens faster. Even sound can be manipulated—almost everyone knows that by now. Labeling AI-generated content can only be an attempt to stop the avalanche that’s coming our way.

Does anyone have a really good idea for a solution to this problem?