Super-realistic A.I. videos blowing everyone's minds on social media, freaking people out a little, too

A.I.-generated imagination of what Donald Trump would look like had he been born in different countries created by TikTok user lookinhistory.

If you're not chronically online, you may have missed the commotion in recent days about the progress being made with A.I., which is now becoming so good that certain tools can generate extremely life-like and cinematic footage of the world's biggest movie stars fighting. And if you didn't know otherwise, you might have no reason to believe that it wasn't the actors themselves appearing in the footage. 

A. I. tools have also been used in recent days to create a short film that would cost a Hollywood studio hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and to imagine what Donald Trump might've looked like had he been born in other parts of the world.

The first such video to make waves last week featured a clip of Tom Cruise fighting with Brad Pitt in a scene that looked like it could've been ripped from a Hollywood blockbuster. Instead, the clip was completely A.I.-generated, purportedly with a two-line prompt entered into Seedance 2.0, an A.I. tool owned by the Chinese parent company that launched TikTok. 

In addition to drawing millions of views on social media, the clip also drew condemnation from SAG-AFTRA, the Hollywood actors union. Meanwhile, one prominent Hollywood scriptwriter sounded an ominous tone on X, declaring, "I hate to say it. It's likely over for us."

This week, the Dor Brothers, who run a production company that creates various types of film and video content, sometimes generated by A.I., posted a three-minute short film that they say would've cost $200 million to produce in real life. It took them one day, they said. The film contains dialogue, blockbuster special effects and characters who look like they're being portrayed by real humans. It also has racked up millions of views.

There's no bigger star in the world than U.S. President Donald Trump, and this week a TikTok account called lookinhistory posted an A.I.-generated video that imagines the answer to the question, "What if Donald Trump was born in other countries?"

The 64-second video, also ultra-realistic looking, takes viewers through a carousel of images of a smiling Trump, and showing what he might look like had he been born in another country along with the variation on his name based on the language and culture of that country.

Viewers are shown what Trump might've looked like had be been born and raised in Mexico, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, and India, among others. As of this writing, the video has amassed more than 13 million views on TikTok and countless more on X, and it's not hard to understand why after you watch it.