Some fun “time lapse” videos of landscaping, patio/courtyard, and balcony makeovers have been coming through my Facebook feed lately. The other day I shared one with a note saying:
This is such a fun use of AI; these videos provide not only a nice, short, uplifting break from the slog of workday tasks but also a rejuvenating “refresh” of ideas and inspiration.
One of my friends left a comment that asked, “Why AI?”
Now, I assumed she meant: How do you know it’s AI? She may have only meant: Why did they make an AI video when they could have filmed a real project? So my bad if she meant the second, because I posted a lengthy reply to the first question, with screenshots and analysis and just really got into explaining how you could tell it was AI.
Sorry, Margaret, if I misinterpreted the intent of your question and went down the wrong rabbit hole!
However, havng once gone down that rabbit hole, I was now left with several screenshots of that video in my phone’s camera roll, and I figured, hey, why not do a THIRD blog post in as many days and share my possibly unwanted and largely unread Facebook-reply blast with the rest of the world?
So here it is. I can’t find this “Moroccan Courtyard” video on YouTube, so I can’t embed it here for viewing right on this page. The video creator seems to post only on Instagram and Facebook.
Link to the video on Instagram HERE.
Link to the video on Facebook HERE.
So first we have the empty courtyard, and if you look at this screenshot, you can see the area in the corners and how much room there is, which is not a lot. By the end of the video there are two ginormous trees that can’t possibly be growing from that small corner on each side. The smaller trees could be, but not the two giant trees that pop up on either side at the very end of the video. Those trees would have to be planted outside the fence of the courtyard. But it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of room between the buildings closer to us and that building that’s across the back of the courtyard.
Now we are sort of in the middle of the build, starting to put in the plantings, including the smaller trees along the outer edges of the courtyard.
And here, toward the end of the daytime hours, we suddenly have the giant trees in the rear corners and clearly between the buildings closer to us and the building farther from us. It seems unlikely that 1) they could plant such tall trees and 2) that those two tall trees would fit in the space provided.
Another weird thing from this point in the video is that the clouds in the sky suddenly stop, just freeze like a photograph. If you look at the sky throughout the video, at first it is overcast, and then we have rather large clouds moving quickly across the sky from left to right. Then the clouds reverse direction, which CAN happen during a day, but usually does not. Usually the wind is moving in one direction pretty much all day. But then, the thing I find a little strange is that as the workers are setting the furniture into place, the sky just completely stops, holds completely still like a photo, and then it starts up again with clouds moving.
So I guess what makes me think it’s AI is the combination of those two really large trees that apparently are getting planted as part of the landscaping and the strange things happening in the sky.
It’s still a fun video to watch, though! I would love to have a little garden area like this
(Later . . .) I’m thinking even harder about why my impression of this video was that it was AI. I went back to one of my screenshots and looked closer, only to find that some of the trees are weirdly blurred, but only in spots, parts of those rear (small) trees are not blurry, while other details, like the palm tree looking things, are in sharp, sharp detail.
Also, the man in the front left has no head.
The other men’s heads are blurred out in a manner similar to the weird, spotty blurring of those trees in the back. This is from the middle of the build, before the ginormous trees are put into place.
A close-up view from this image is below. What I find “suspect” is that the blurring seems selective. The man’s head and the tree surrounding it. Yet detail at the top of the tree behind the man and detail of that tree/plant with the spiky fronds is fairly crisp.
Nobody is going to go to these lengths in daily life to see whether a video is AI or not. But I think we can and should, all of us, work to train our sixth sense to be more aware of the AI “tells.”
Because one thing is for sure: The AI video tsunmai is coming. The tide is way, way out, and the water is starting to foam. We need to recognize the signs and do what’s necessary to avoid ending up as flotsam!
Katherine Wikoff 