ByEmily Baker-White,
Forbes Staff.
O
ne of the single most watched political videos on YouTube right now involves an AI-generated Vladimir Putin and Ali Khamenei setting a pack of pseudo-cartoon bears on Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu after Trump and Netanyahu push Khamenei out of a plane. It has more than 20 million views, nearly 150,000 likes, and variously hosts programmatic ads for ketamine, “stuck poop” solutions and “the world’s first mass produced exoskeleton.”
The video is one of thousands published by a cluster of YouTube accounts posting short, Tom-and-Jerry-esque AI-generated skits depicting world leaders in humiliatingly ludicrous scenarios. The reach of the videos is astonishing: Since they began appearing earlier this year, they have amassed more than 2.2 billion views. (For context, the official White House YouTube account has accrued 88 million views since it was established in 2006; Comedy Central’s The Daily Show has 4.4 billion total views over the nine years it’s been active.)
