Tail Wagging Cats, Veterinary Implications of AI Generated Videos

Abstract

BACKGROUND. Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) has the capacity to create realistic and convincing animal videos; however, it must simplify and reduce behavioural variation to do so, possibly leading to misinformation. METHODS. We categorised 29 videos in the press release for a specific video genAI engine. Twelve featured animals. We mapped each video to the five domains of animal welfare (nutrition, physical environment, health, behavioural interactions and mental state) and categorised behaviour and welfare accordingly. RESULTS. Negative welfare was rarely seen, ranging from 8% (n = 1) for nutrition to 42% (n = 5) for behavioural interactions. By contrast, mental state, environment and behavioural interactions appeared positive in 42% (n = 5) of the videos featured. However, videos were often misleading or did not represent accurate animal behaviour. LIMITATIONS. This work was limited to a press release of data and did not explore user experience. CONCLUSIONS. genAI videos pose a new route for client confusion, and veterinarians need to incorporate the combatting of genAI misinformation in their practice.

Behind the Paper

I was absolutely fascinated when the Sora2/Nanobanana/Veo 3.1 iteration of generative AI models came out. Suddenly, we can have a very plausible looking video of an animal doing crazy things. I was fooled myself by a few of them!

Sora 2’s press release had so many animal-related videos in it, these were meant to be the most impressive, most compelling uses of the tool for advertising its existence, and yet these were plenty of examples of questionable behaviour or potentially harmful interactions.

In this paper, we deliberately chose to use only the videos contained in the press release, as this saved us from having to generate our own videos, and didn’t mean we were using other peoples’ content. As an exploratory first step, this seemed like a good ethical compromise when dealing with AI generated content.

Video

You can watch a short video about this paper here on LinkedIn or Here on TikTok

Tail Wagging Cats

Citation

Download bibtex file