Do AI-generated videos obey physics laws?

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI)-generated videos become ever more common in our students’ social media feeds, an interesting question arises: Can we use physics to distinguish AI-generated videos from real ones? This paper showcases how a short AI video can be generated for educational purposes for free and provides a simple activity in which a real and an AI-generated video of two falling objects are analysed using freely available online tools. The results reveal some possible ways of identifying that a video may be AI-generated. The proposed activity can be used to help students develop a critical attitude to AI-generated content and can be framed as a forensic activity to add some excitement to the physics lesson.