Thursday, May 11, 2023

Video of robot attacking factory worker is computer-generated

By MELISSA GOLDIN
May 9, 2023

CLAIM: A video shows a robot attacking a human factory worker.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. The video was created with CGI technology by Sozo Bear Films, the production company told The Associated Press. It was first posted on the company’s TikTok account in January 2022.

THE FACTS: The CGI video resurfaced this week when users on Instagram and TikTok shared it as a real-life assault.

It shows two standalone robotic arms moving boxes on a factory floor in grainy, black-and-white footage made to seem as if it was taken by a security camera. After one robot lets a box fall, the camera pans to the other machine, which creates an explosion of sparks by banging violently on a conveyor belt at its workstation. A human worker then puts his hands up in surrender before the robot throws multiple boxes at him, causing him to fall backward, and destroys part of the conveyor belt.

Ominous music plays in the background while captions narrate what is happening in the video. “ROBOT ATTACKS WORKER!” one reads after the robot throws the first box.

“Video captures the moment when a box-packaging robot makes a critical error,” says a voiceover at the beginning of the video. “And what follows will send shivers down your spine. Watch this.”

One TikTok post sharing the clip had been viewed more than 422,000 times as of Tuesday. An Instagram post — captioned, “AI can be scary!” — had received more than 2,200 likes.

But the video is not real, Sozo Bear Films confirmed to the AP.

“We made the video using visual effects,” Luke Pilgrim and Brad Kennedy, the Georgia-based company’s co-owners and directors, wrote in a joint emailed statement. “We use our tiktok and youtube platform to hone our visual effects skills and try out new ideas so that’s essentially what this video was.”

The original has also been posted multiple times on the company’s YouTube channel. These versions do not include the voiceover and use different music than the clip spreading on social media this week.

Sozo Bear Films, which specializes in commercials, music videos and short films, posted a video outlining how it created the CGI footage on TikTok and YouTube in February and March 2022, respectively. It features Pilgrim and Ellis Treece, the company’s lead VFX artist, who explains that he used software such as Blender, a 3D computer graphics tool, and Adobe After Effects, a post-production visual effects program.

“We wanted to make something that looked really believable, looked realistic, but we also wanted to tell a story,” Pilgrim says in the video. “And so we gave the robot some emotion, which kind of gave away that they were CGI to most people, but it still made a really cool video and I think overall it was a success.”

In their joint statement, Pilgrim and Kennedy pointed out that it can be easy to be fooled by the clip if people haven’t seen the video explaining how it was made.

“Plus when it gets re-shared out of context by someone else that also leads to confusion on whether it’s real or not,” they wrote.

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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.

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