On Sunday, a social media user took to their X account to share a TikTok video of You star Penn Badgley ahead of the FIFA World Cup final between Spain and Argentina.
In the clip, Penn is sitting in a car wearing a Spanish soccer shirt, fixing his hair and flexing his muscles without saying a word.
The X user captioned the post: “Penn Badgley supporting Spain in the World Cup final.”
The clip went viral pretty quickly, with more than 4 million views in just two days. While many of the responses were thirsting over Penn, it also sparked some backlash — with people questioning why the 39-year-old actor was flexing and posing on social media in this way.
And this is precisely the problem: Penn Badgley isn’t doing anything. None of it is real. The Penn seen in the video isn’t real, his overt support for Spain isn’t real, the TikTok isn’t real. It is all entirely AI generated.
Even more scarily, the video originates from a TikTok account named after Penn’s character in You — Joe Goldberg — which has more than 318,000 followers.
The account’s description includes the disclaimer: “IM NOT THE REAL @Penn Badgley MY VIDEOS ARE AI,” and sure enough, the profile is full of AI-generated videos of Penn in various scenarios — some have millions of likes, with the World Cup one being liked by more than 3.3 million people at the time of writing, with over 21 million views.
A particularly viral tweet summed up the situation pretty well, reading: “anyone saying this is ‘obviously’ ai is lying. it’s not obvious, and will be even less so in three months. we need to be against deepfaking and gen ai on principle, because the better it gets, the more dangerous it will be.” The user added in a follow-up: “this video is nonconsensual deepfake fetish content. it currently has 19.8 million views/3 million likes on tiktok with no ai label or anything. imagine if such a thing happened to you, your daughter, etc.”
And many people are inclined to agree, with one person replying: “I don’t think people are really grasping this… 5 years ago if you showed this as a video NO ONE would think AI because the video AI was trash. 5 years… 5. We aren’t ready for whatever is going to happen from this technology now being created at a speed that can’t be stopped.”
Shutting down the argument from those who insisted they immediately knew it wasn't Penn in the video, somebody else noted: “Y’all pointing out all the minor details that you saw like his mannerisms just go to show if you’re not obsessed w someone or extremely knowledgeable of their traits, appearances, and careers, then you wouldn’t be able to identify if it’s AI or not. Nobody gaf about everybody.”
Another user echoed: “i generally hate when people are like ‘hurr durr it’s obviously AI’ but like no…it really isn’t always all that obvious lmao. we only know that THIS is AI because we already have a preconceived notion of who he may be and this seems out of character for him lol.”
Some also reiterated that AI is only going to become more and more advanced — and subsequently, more and more dangerous. One wrote: “it's so frightening that this is the worst it's ever gonna be.” Somebody else added: “Generative AI will only get better with time and it's not really a matter of if it's obvious to you how are people missing that.”
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