The Mirror Test
How AI fakes expose a crisis in critical thinking that predates them
If your feeds look anything like mine, they are full of things that feel slightly wrong. A mountain goat carries its kid up a sheer cliff, then glides through open air like a character in a video game. A child stands beside countless dog shelters built entirely out of plastic bottles. Or a crafts video that runs a little too smoothly, a little too perfect to be real.
There is a reason these clips feel off. They are. They were generated by AI, and although many of them sit on a kernel of something true, they show events that never happened.
I believe this flood of AI fakes deserves more of our attention than almost anything else on an educator’s plate right now. For me, this synthetic flood is, at its core, a story about how human minds work. It points to a weakness in our thinking that predates every image generator by a wide margin. Generative AI works like a mirror, and the uncomfortable thing about a mirror is that it only shows you what is already there.
But before we get to why we fall for it, it is worth seeing just how much of this is out there, and how strange it gets.
A catalogue of small forgeries
Let’s start with fake merchandise. Over the past year, social platforms have been saturated with ads for AI plush toys. Two of them, sold as Koaly and Pandy, promise something close to a living animal: a koala that breathes against your chest, a panda that hugs you back through patented “Hug Motion” or “CuddleMotion” technology.
The ad videos are enticing. The fur catches the light, the toy blinks and shifts its weight, and a wall of five-star reviews confirms the magic. But the plush that shows up in the mail is just a cheap stuffed animal worth only a few dollars, with nothing inside. The robotics that were promised never existed.
I don’t think the buyers of these toys are irrational. They are working from a reasonable premise: artificial intelligence is indeed advancing quickly, so a low-cost robotic toy seems plausible enough. The ad simply leverages the credibility of genuine progress to sell a product that does not work the way it is advertised.
Then there are stories about the incredible feats of wildlife. A whole genre of clips shows mountain goats running up vertical rock faces and then sailing through the air with a kid on their back. Posted by automated accounts, they routinely pull in millions of views.
The giveaways are everywhere once you look closer: herds moving in perfect unison, or a goat staring straight into a camera that could not have been placed where it was. And the headline feat is plainly impossible. No goat glides through open air. Nor do mountain goats carry their kids around on their backs. The young are up and managing the terrain on their own legs within days of birth.
But everybody knows that mountain goats really are astonishing climbers, biologically built for near-vertical terrain. So when a skeptic flags the footage as fake, defenders cite that actual ability as proof the video is real. A true fact about the animal is used to wave away an obvious forgery.
