The other day, a friend asked if I’d seen that
video on TikTok of a dog climbing a high diving board and doing flips into a pool. Of course I had. Who hasn’t? There’s a whole genre now: dogs doing stunts, dogs riding skateboards, dogs
playing poker. None of it’s real; all of it’s AI.
Still, it’s fun. You scroll past one clip, then another, and pretty soon you’re down the rabbit hole — or maybe
the dog hole. A beagle orders at a drive-thru. A golden retriever critiques modern art. A pug explains tax policy with surprising passion. The physics are always a little off, the lip sync not quite
right, but it doesn’t matter. They’re dogs. They’re funny. They’re harmless.
Or are they?
Spend enough time with these AI dogs, and you start to notice
what’s just under the surface: a paw that bends the wrong way. A tail that twitches like it belongs to a cat. Your brain catches the glitch, but your eyes go along with it anyway. And after a
few minutes, you stop checking. You just accept the premise: Dogs can do backflips. Dogs can sing opera. Dogs can debate politics.
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That’s the trick AI plays. It doesn’t need to be
perfect. It just needs to be good enough that you go along with the story.
And that’s fine when we’re talking about Labradors on diving boards.
But here’s where the
dog days of AI summer take a turn.
Mixed into my feed last week — right between a dachshund playing the drums and a husky driving a convertible — was something else entirely: a
video of garbage piled high across the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
The images showed tents, trash, people wandering, and mountains of debris stacked against the backdrop of the Capitol. The kind of scene you might expect from a war
zone, not the frontyard of American democracy. The video was labeled as AI-generated, but the comment thread told a different story.
Some viewers swore it was proof of political collapse.
“This is absolutely unbelievable,” one wrote. Another piled on: “Just take a good look right here at your screen and you’ll see everything Democrats did to America.”
Others pushed back, armed with the credibility of people who live nearby. One user snapped, “I live in D.C. it does not look like this. Whoever did this should be ashamed of
themselves.” Another added that there were “no homeless encampments in DC like that,” insisting the clip looked more like Seattle, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.
Then there
were the confused, the people caught in the uncanny valley. Asked one, “OMG is that real or AI vidéo?” Another admitted, “I truly thought this was some war-torn country but
it’s the capital of the USA???”
And finally, there were the voices that recognized what was happening. “AI is going to ruin the world,” one commenter wrote. “And
just think, someone is going to really believe this is how DC looks.” Another, more pointed comment, put it this way: “AI is MAGA’s best friend.”
That’s the
shift. From playful puppies to partisan propaganda in the space of a scroll. Same tools. Same tricks. Different consequences.
The dog clips feel like a carnival sideshow — a way to test
the technology in a space where nobody gets hurt. But the garbage-on-the-Mall images show how quickly the same tools become political weapons.
The problem isn’t whether the images are
“convincing.” Most people can spot something off about them. The problem is that even when people know it’s fake, they still use it to argue, to accuse, to reinforce
whatever story they already believe.
That’s the real disinformation economy of 2025. It’s not about making you believe something that isn’t true. It’s about flooding
the zone with so much noise that the truth itself becomes optional.
One minute you’re chuckling at a golden retriever doing a triple-flip. The next, you’re knee-deep in a fight
about whether Washington, D.C. is drowning in trash.
The dog days of AI summer aren’t just about dogs. They’re about what happens when we stop noticing where the funny ends and the
truth gets turned into a blurry world of amplified misinformation. It’s not just the dogs, really.