Beware the AI Generated DashCam Footage

On Thursday morning I saw a post on the Massachusetts subreddit which was tagged with Hopkinton. Dashcam footage, 11:35pm, late Wednesday night, a car is driving along, and suddenly out of the dark a man with a construction vest and creepy masks steps out from the side of the road in front of the car, appearing to hold something in his hand – a knife, a weapon, who knows. The car slows, drives around, and speeds off.

The video was posted to multiple subreddits, Massachusetts, Dashcam, roadcam, Hopkinton, Creepy, etc., wherever it fit, and all of the posts had hundreds of likes and thousands of comments.

The trouble is, I’ve seen this before. My video feeds on TikTok and YouTube Shorts have been filled with these sorts of “Car stops short, and 4 masked people jump out, and the driver speeds off,” and all of them are generated by AI.

AI videos are usually pretty easy to detect. 6 fingered hands, logos that don’t make sense, license plates that are garbled and non-sensical, some are harder than others. While the models have all gotten better at generating those videos and they’re more and more convincing, spammers and slop makers have gotten better at what sorts of videos to generate that don’t expose their limitations. Dashcam footage is perfect for this because it’s low-resolution, dark, events happen quickly.

With this particular post, I jumped onto the OP’s profile. Their only other public post on Reddit (other than spamming this video) was about OpenClaw, the agentic AI platform. I was almost certain it was AI at that point, so I posted that I thought it was. OP never responded to me, my reply only got a couple of upvotes, but 5 hours later when I went to OP’s profile again, the OpenClaw posts were removed.

Beware the AI generated dashcam video.