Local NBC Station Deceived by AI Video of Race Track Blackout Leading to Major Collision

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      The internet's obsession with AI nonsense is escalating, and you likely don't need me to point that out. The endless deepfakes of celebrities making absurd statements can really take a toll on a person. Some satirical social media accounts occasionally manage to produce genuinely humorous content, much like a blind squirrel finding a nut, and they deceive a considerable number of people in the process. Recently, a fake video of a dirt track race car pileup managed to mislead even a legitimate news outlet into believing the incident actually occurred.

      NBC Chicago aired a brief segment Wednesday night featuring a video from the Weaber Valley Speedway Facebook page. The (fabricated) footage shows an entire field of dirt late model race cars navigating the track until the lights go out, resulting in a crash.

      On its own, that isn’t entirely implausible—and some might consider it newsworthy. However, the Channel Five station overlooked some crucial indicators that this was completely fabricated.

      “We later discovered the power company in the area turned off the lights to pressure the track owners into paying their electric bill on time,” the reporter relayed on-air, drawing information from the post's caption, which was written in broken English. “The track then provided each car involved in the crash an additional $5 to assist with repair costs.”

      This aligns perfectly with Weaber Valley Speedway’s theme. A visit to their page, which boasts around 340,000 Facebook followers and an additional 40,000 on Instagram, reveals that they consistently post about exaggerated redneck stereotypes. Occasionally, they share something relatively believable, but the majority of their content is clearly satire (albeit extremely well-executed). Surely, had NBC Chicago seen a video of a NASA space shuttle crashing on the track or a possum smoking a cigarette while giving a thumbs up to the camera, they would have recognized this clip as fake as well.

      The Weaber Valley Speedway page is managed by Howard Weaver, and I was able to speak with him over the phone regarding this evening news blunder.

      “The way he delivered that with a straight face,” Weaver chuckled, recalling the newscaster's belief in the backstory. When a friend shared a recording of the news segment with him, he questioned whether it was authentic or an AI creation. “You can’t trust anything these days,” he joked.

      Weaver mentioned he created the clip using OpenAI’s new Sora 2 video generator. He described it as the best tool currently available for producing hyper-realistic videos, though it requires extensive direction to achieve something as polished as the power outage clip.

      “My prompt for a single video like that probably consists of three paragraphs,” Weaver explained. “I’m not merely saying, ‘Create a video of the power going out at the dirt track followed by a car crash.’ I’m specifying file names for it to utilize, to mimic a cellphone video, using descriptions like, ‘Shaky handheld iPhone 11 video taken from the bleachers,’ and so on.”

      “I’m practically writing a book just to get a 10-second video,” Weaver added.

      Weaber Valley has become one of the largest dirt track pages on Facebook, surpassed only by major ones like Eldora Speedway in follower count, and it isn’t even real. Many people are in on the joke, but there remains a significant number who get duped. The frenzy will likely escalate as models like Sora continue to improve with every update.

      “I have mixed feelings about it because it’s somewhat frightening, but also amusing, yet it’s also quite alarming,” Weaver remarked. “I believe social media is going to struggle because of this.”

      Perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad outcome, but this story isn’t really centered around that.

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