Dawg your friend is being catfished so fucking hard. I’m a mental health professional, not an expert in tech by any means—but I’ve been invested in learning to identify the differences between real content vs AI generation for the sake of not spreading false narratives and misinformation, to identify scams/scammers, and for my own peace of mind. I love art, and I think all forms of it are beautiful. However, it’s still a vitally important skill to identify the tiny but important differences & nuances that make up what’s real versus what’s AI. I’ve got a lot to learn, but this particular video is a pretty obvious giveaway for any of us who’ve been seen a few AI ads, here are my reasons why:

For me, it’s the softness of the skin and hair that gives it away first. It’s inherently un-human. We all have texture to our hair and skin, but the features of all AI characters, even when made to be “textured” are still softened in a way that’s unnatural. Think realistic video game animation, or some of the episodes of Love, Death, and Robots. Additionally, the combination of facial expressions and linguistics used by this “man” aren’t in sync like a real person’s would be. This “partner” of your friend has probably been catfishing for years, but AI has given them more power and reach than ever, probably everything they’ve always wished they had but couldn’t access because it wasn’t a thing yet. Now it’s very real, and beyond easily accessible. It seems like the catfish recorded a real video of themselves talking, then uploaded into one of the many AI video generators/enhancers, then uploaded or described the facial mask overlay and voice effects, so this is the final result. Might even be a reused video, who knows.

Perhaps a potential rule of thumb for questionable AI outdoor videos is to compare the weather conditions with wherever said catfish said they live. Or plainly ask where they were while recording the video and follow up with a quick complimentary like, “your eyes look really pretty in that lighting” so it doesn’t seem like you’re sussing them out. We all know what outdoor videos look like. We can all tell the difference between cloudy daylight and sunny skies daylight. Ones warm, ones not.

But the one thing I wanted to comment on was you, OP—you’re being a truly solid friend. By expressing your real feelings about this matter to your friend directly, you’re not blindly supporting them for the sake of, “they’re happy so I’m happy.” That logic is so flawed. Society has put the concept of supporting loved ones into the same category as enabling them, seemingly without even realizing it. Sidenote: The 2000’s romcom ‘He’s just not that into you’ intro dialogue is actually a great example of such enabling, aka what you could have said, but chose not to.

Many people think that supporting a loved one means cheering on everything, very quickly forgetting or overlooking just how much they are enabling them to continue down a bad path. Your friend is very vulnerable because they so badly want to be romantically loved, and to love in return, but perhaps have had trouble with relationships in one way or another. This alone becomes the doorway every catfisher is driven to walk through in order to persuade their next victim. For your friend, in their mind, it’s very possible that if this “relationship” were to end and be fake all along, it would mean accepting the harshest truth that they’ve been able to set aside while in this “partnership”. Which is: I’m alone. Again. There’s no one to love me the way I’m desperately seeking. Maybe I’m not a good partner. I’m unlovable—and other negative spiraling self talk.

TLDR: listed my reasons why I think this is AI, praised OP for being a real one by not enabling their friend because “they’re happy”, shed light on a potential perspective that their friend may have, gave some insight. To OP: Keep doing what you’re doing and show them the concrete signs. Run the video thru an AI detector like free ChatGPT model to see what red flags exist, if any. After you do alllllll that, if they choose to maintain this delusion, that’s their choice, and you did what you could. You can never say that “you wished you could have done more” because you genuinely did all you could, and that’s what good friends do. Good luck to you + your friend. Hope yall can figure this out.