It was inevitable, really. From the moment the first AI text-to-video tools were rolled out to the public, it was only a matter of time until even the most savvy internet users were fooled by the content in their feeds. Most just didn’t expect the final straw to be a baby kangaroo waiting for someone to check its documents at the airport. And yet…

In late May, 2025, a video was posted to Instagram showing just that: a small kangaroo, wearing a harness and clutching its boarding pass, standing patiently as a woman (presumably its owner) argues with an airport official in a non-existent foreign language. “No kangaroos on the plane,” read the caption. To anyone seeing the original post, it should have been immediately obvious it was a fake – it was posted by an account called Infinite Unreality, after all. But it soon escaped containment. 

Since it started circulating on X and Threads, the video has been viewed out of context tens of millions of times. And yes, a significant portion of these viewers think it’s a scene straight out of real life. Many, in fact, say that it’s their first time falling for an AI-generated video (at least, to their knowledge). This makes it a milestone for generative AI, but it also seems like a bad sign for a generation that thought itself impervious to online fakes and scams. “I fell for the airport kangaroo ai video, I am just as bad as a boomer,” one X user writes. “If not worse!”

Is the ‘emotional support kangaroo’ really this generation’s Nigerian prince? Well, it doesn’t have the same malicious intent behind it, at least. “Honestly? I consider everything that I post shitposting,” says Infinite Unreality, a 25-year-old tech worker and former YouTuber based in LA. A tech bro, you might say. “There’s nothing of actual substance, but people like that. And people hate it simultaneously.” 

In the end, it’s all good for engagement. And there’s a lot of engagement. Launched just over three months ago, Infinite Reality reportedly averaged around 10 million views a day before the kangaroo video went viral, with the most popular – and disturbing – videos gaining some 125 million views. Needless to say, that kind of hype comes with a certain amount of backlash. “I get a lot of death threats, surprisingly,” its creator adds. “I don’t know why.” For that reason, he doesn’t want to show his face or reveal his name, to “stay as anonymous as possible” until absolutely necessary. 

Nevertheless, he agreed to speak to Dazed about the viral kangaroo video, its backlash, and what it says about broader attitudes toward AI art. Is he morally compromised for using this new tech to mislead millions, and even fool his grandma with videos of uncanny babies and mutant animals? Or is he just exploring a new creative frontier? You decide!

How did you get into AI art in the first place? Do you intend to shitpost your way into a full-time career?

Infinite Unreality: I realised my time was running out with AI. Now is the perfect window of opportunity, where we have these tools to do whatever we want. Within the next five years, it’s going to get easier and easier, and from that point forward it’s just going to start falling down, because everything’s going to be automated. It’s not going to get much better than this. I mean, that’s obviously just my theory about AI and the way the world is going to be in 10 years. But it’s inevitable that AI takes over, and I just really wanted to capitalise on the opportunity, build a brand. 

I didn’t know I was going to get death threats... And I didn’t know it would happen so quickly. I think in a year from now, the technology is going to be so good that anybody can make my videos.

What technology are you actually using right now?

Infinite Unreality: I don’t even use Veo 3 [Google’s leading text-to-video model] or whatever it is, or else the audio would be English. I don’t use that because it looks too good. And I think that's the key to deception, the fact that it’s not perfect. Perfection’s too good to be true.

The kangaroo video took me three minutes to make, and I could tell you my whole process... but I’m not going to. At first, that was more so about people stealing my stuff. Now, I almost feel like it’s inevitable that people are going to start making realistic videos that are actually malicious. But everything is AI-generated.

Even the writing and ideas are AI-generated?

Infinite Unreality: The entire process. I go in every day, and I tell it the videos that have done well the last week. I tell it the videos that are getting views, and the ones that aren’t, and it kind of runs me off a whole report. It says, ‘This is what we should focus on,’ and it generates images and videos based off that.

So where do you come in?

Infinite Unreality:  I would say it’s probably 95 per cent AI. I take what AI does, and I put it into other AIs and stuff. I take images and turn them into videos. It’s about a 10-step process. But the whole idea and everything that you see is all based on what AI thinks is going to get views. I’m not coming up with the kangaroo with the boarding pass and the fanny pack and all that stuff. That’s just AI doing AI things. I’m not some creative genius.

So the style of your videos, the ones that feature creepy babies and uncanny animals in unlikely scenarios...?

Infinite Unreality: People think I have some baby fetish. I’m like, no, it’s AI doing that. It’s because you guys want to watch this stuff. I don’t know what to say!

People think I have some baby fetish. I’m like, no, it’s AI doing that. It’s because you guys want to watch this stuff. I don’t know what to say!

Were you surprised to see the kangaroo video trick so many people?

Infinite Unreality: It’s one of those things where I think the average person doesn’t realise where technology is. They don’t realise what it’s capable of. I’ve been making these videos for a while, but they never really got onto a mainstream platform or into the media. But I think maybe it was the fact that the kangaroo is just sitting there and looks all cute, and the zoom-in effect.

It doesn’t surprise me. I always knew that I could do it, and I’m glad I did it.

You’re glad you tricked people?

Infinite Unreality: A lot of my stuff is obviously fake because there’s no way it could be reality. I had this one, it was a baby kangaroo in a preschool or something. He’s got a human baby in his pouch, and he stands up and starts attacking the teacher. It’s a mess. And it got five million views and stuff like that, but it’s obviously fake. It’s more so the realistic style that I shoot for every time. And I knew it would at some point trick somebody. And I knew that I’d be the first to do it, most likely.

Lots of people do say it was the first time they got tricked by an AI video.

Infinite Unreality: My grandma is following me on Instagram. She’s been following me for a while and she didn’t even know it, because I followed my account for her, so she’s just seeing all this stuff and bringing it up: ‘Hey, have you seen this shrimp baby being fed butter by this guy?’ It’s just crazy, how the older generation gets completely bamboozled.

It was obviously going to happen to them, though, and it was just a matter of time for the younger generation to get caught, too.

We have to talk about the death threats...

Infinite Unreality: I know most threats are just words, but I get some weird ones, and it’s just the worst stuff. I was getting them a lot more when I was doing baby videos for whatever reason. I would get threats saying they were going to kill me because the baby’s sacred... I don’t know if they think it’s an actual thing. I have this one video where it’s a bacon-wrapped baby in a microwave. And I got 10 or so DMs from people saying, ‘How could you bacon-wrap a baby and put it in a microwave?’ Or even the people who knew it was fake said: ‘You're giving ideas to real people.’ But like, if you’re going to take a random baby and wrap them in bacon and throw them in somebody’s microwave, you’re going to do it anyway. 

What do you make of the broader mainstream backlash to AI?

Infinite Unreality: So many people hate me for it. Many people hate the resources it uses, and all this stuff. And I don’t know... I mean, of course, I want the planet to be clean. I want everything to be great and perfect, but if I don’t do it, somebody else will. It’s going to happen. There’s no way to control it at this point.

Some would say that your energy is better spent opting out, or pushing back against it.

Infinite Unreality: I don’t think you can. Maybe you can reject creative media, films, music, all this stuff. But it’s going to be very difficult for people to know what’s real and what isn’t, and there’s going to be people fighting and arguing about it to the point where it’s going to take too much energy for the average person... They’re not going to care anymore. They’re just going to let it happen. Especially when you look at corporations replacing factory workers and all these things. I mean, that’s going to happen whether people want it or not because it’s all about money at the end of the day.

Ultimately I see the world being miserable in 10 years.

Would you like to automate Infinite Unreality altogether?

Infinite Unreality: Ideally, yeah. I think it would be more like me hiring somebody else to run the process, rather than AI taking it all over, at the moment. But a year from now, who knows?

Where do you see the technology heading in the future?

Infinite Unreality: I think of future Netflix, where you’re going to load up Netflix and it’s going to say, ‘What do you want to watch today?’ and you go, ‘I want to watch this, with this and this and this’. And boom. A second later, there are four or five AI-generated films catered directly towards what you want. And maybe you even own the rights to them or something. I don’t know how it would work. That sounds great... at first. But it’s one of those things where, if you give people everything that they desire, then what is there left to be desired? I’ll be honest. Ultimately, I see the world being miserable in 10 years.