Food-related scams are flooding social media with hyper-realistic AI-generated videos

“If you bought fish at the market, put it in water. If it sinks, it’s fresh; if it floats, it’s bad.” Thus begins a video that has already been seen by more than 25 million people. The protagonist is Paco del Campo, an elderly man with a charming appearance who offers advice on diet and health. This is not an isolated case. In recent weeks very similar videos have proliferated and have also racked up millions of views. We can cite three examples, such as Eduardo, a middle-aged man who presents himself as an “expert in holistic health and a dietitian” and warns us about the alleged dangers of pangasius, tilapia and salmon in a video that begins: “Never eat these three fish if you don’t want to die tomorrow…”.

Or Sofía, a woman who shares “methods on holistic health” and warns about the supposed danger of pesticides allegedly found on apples: “Never buy apples without checking this first…”. The third example is also the most surreal. Manuel del Campo, an elderly man with an Amish-looking appearance, shows two pieces of salmon on the asphalt of a supermarket parking lot. One is swarming with ants because it is supposedly wild, while the other piece is free of insects because it is farmed and “is full of toxins,” he says.

All of these videos have millions of views, thousands of likes and hundreds of comments from people worried about their health and diet. But most people are unaware of two things: that the messages are false and that Paco, Eduardo, Sofía and Manuel do not even exist. They are characters created with artificial intelligence. But that is not all.

Cloned videos

If we run a quick search on those profiles, we’ll see that they all post almost identical versions of the same videos, with the same setting and exactly the same messages, word for word: the one about the three fish, the one about apples, the one about the salmons…

What’s more, if we keep searching across social networks we’ll find that Paco, Eduardo, Sofía and Manuel are not the only characters appearing in those videos. There are hundreds of variations, maybe thousands, with the same staging and identical messages but different protagonists: different ages, occupations, nationalities, ethnicities, religions, languages. There’s something for every audience: kindly elderly women, Tibetan monks, farmers, doctors, shamans… Tailored and adapted to different publics to elicit our empathy and win our trust.

They all follow the same formula: profiles with health-related names (healer, natural, holistic, wellness, etc.), sensational videos about everyday topics and scripts written expressly to stir our emotions.

For this article, 150 Instagram profiles with these characteristics were analyzed; together they have more than 23 million followers. Seventy-five percent are in English, 20% in Spanish and the remaining 5% in other languages such as French, German or Russian. But there are many more profiles on that social network and also on others like TikTok, X or Facebook.

Crafting hoaxes at scale and to order

These kinds of videos can be placed within a broader phenomenon known as AI slop, a colloquial term used to describe the avalanche of low-quality content generated with artificial intelligence.

In many cases the apparent goal is to capture millions of views to monetize user attention or to steer viewers toward products, courses or e-books.

But behind all this there is something more important than a few viral videos: a whole paradigm shift. First, because now, thanks to AI, hoaxes can be produced at industrial scale and practically without the need for time, effort or advanced expertise. In fact, there are already nearly autonomous AI accounts (dubbed by some researchers “agentic AI accounts”) capable of generating content automatically: they detect the health or food topics attracting the most interest at any given time, generate a script, create videos adapted to each of the profiles we mentioned earlier, publish the content, analyze which posts perform best and repeat the formulas that work.

In other words, it is not even necessary for a person to produce each video. Their role can be limited to launching the system and supervising it.

If I don’t see it, I don’t believe it…

But the revolution does not stop there. There is a second, deeper change: we can no longer trust what we see.

For more than a century we have considered photography, and later video, a reliable proof of reality. If we saw it with our own eyes, it had to be true.

But generative AI has broken that link between image and reality because it can produce hyperreal people who do not exist in settings that are not real.

In many cases there are still details that allow us to detect at a glance that they were generated with AI, such as slightly unnatural movements or unrealistic lighting. But it is highly likely that in the near future those images will be virtually indistinguishable from reality.

The threats of AI-generated hoaxes

As we can imagine, this phenomenon poses a threat. The flood of hoaxes transmits false ideas about food and health that can influence our behavior and dietary choices.

In some cases these hoaxes are practically harmless, such as one that claims the flavor of peppers is related to the number of bumps at their base. But others are far more dangerous, like those that claim we can cure serious illnesses by eating fruit with honey.

They can compromise not only our health but also our wallets. For example, many of the profiles mentioned in this article sell e-books with “natural” remedies as false as the claims in their videos and likely also produced with AI.

The consequences of this phenomenon are not limited to the personal sphere. Such hoaxes can jeopardize public health and the reputation or survival of a product, a company or an entire sector. They can go even further. For instance, if those videos focused directly on political issues, they could influence electoral outcomes.

How can we detect these hoaxes?

Sometimes detecting hoaxes is complicated, especially if we lack specific knowledge about the subjects they address. But now it’s much harder because the use of hyperreal images makes them more credible.

It’s also far more difficult to debunk them. It has always been costly because it requires far more time and effort than creating them. But now that they are produced at industrial scale, it becomes an almost impossible mission.

Social media moderation mechanisms do not help either because they are not effective at preventing the spread of these kinds of posts and do not require clear labeling when content has been generated with AI. In fact, some of these profiles even have a verification badge.

So, in the era of generative AI, our eyes are no longer enough to distinguish reality from fiction. That is why, before sharing a video, it’s wise to sharpen our critical sense: check who posted it, what evidence it provides and whether the information is backed by reliable sources. When in doubt, keep in mind that if a message is too good or too terrible to be true, it most likely isn’t.

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