Weird AI-generated Videos of Sailors Saving Whales and Polar Bears

Recently, on social media, I've been seeing videos posted showing polar bears, beluga whales, and other marine mammals being saved by humans. 

They are clearly injured, and sometimes even bleeding, at the beginning of the video, but, thanks to the intervention of kind sailors, they are nursed back to health and released into the wild again. These animals always show gratitude toward their benefactors by snuggling up to them or looking back one last time before they float off on an ice berg or descend into the depths of the sea.

These videos are obviously AI-generated but they are not identified as such and comments indicate that many people believe them to be genuine, expressing admiration and thanks for the men (they're always men and never women) who rescue these pitiful creatures who got tangled in ropes or mangled by a ship's propeller. These images are part of a larger body of postings that I've been seeing on social media that either misidentify animal and plant life or post images of natural phenomena that have been manipulated by AI in strange ways. For example, photos of extraordinarily colored birds are shown with outrageous color patterns that clearly don't appear in nature. I have had friends who have fallen for them and believed they depicted reality.

As someone who loves to learn about plants and animals, it disturbs me that misinformation is frivolously disseminated. I suppose the purpose is to get clicks and likes and to generate income. It's becoming easier for people to use AI to generate posts painlessly, and the AI can even figure out what social media users are likely to engage with. My guess is that I've been pegged as a sucker for a cute whale or polar bear, which is why they're appearing in my feeds.

A New Whaling Fleet “mother ship” Completed…Why?

 

The Kangei Maru is seen sailing off the coast of Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, on Friday, March 29, 2024. (The Yomiuri Shimbun)

Inexplicably, considering the fact that there is almost zero demand for whale meat by the general public in Japan and throughout the world, the construction of a brand new whaling fleet “mother ship,” Kangei Maru, was just completed. Owned by Kyodo Senpaku Co., it was reported in The Japan News that it has the capacity to “haul up 70-ton fin whales, two to three times larger than Bryde’s and sei whales loaded by the Nisshin Maru, because its slipway has a shallower slope than the predecessor’s.” The Nisshin Maru was decommissioned last November (2023) and the Kangei Maru is meant to replace it. 

The Nisshin Maru, infamously, processed 17,072 whales caught by “catcher boats” since 1991. Some of the whales were processed ostensively for “research” purposes and others for commercial purposes, but, regardless of the stated purpose, the vast majority of the processed catch ended up in markets. While it plied the Southern Ocean, it was occasionally rammed by the far smaller Sea Shepherd anti-whaling vessels in a David and Goliath struggle over the protection vs. the slaughter of these majestic creatures far from Japan’s shores. 

Tired of pretending to slaughter whales for “research” purposes, and always getting criticized by the international community for engaging in a practice most of the rest of the world considered to be barbaric, Japan quit its membership in the International Whaling Commission in 2019 and resumed the undisguised and unapologetic commercial exploitation of whales. 

The replacement of Nisshin Maru with the larger capacity Kangei Maru shows Japan’s resolve to go against the prevailing world sentiment, the best interests of Japanese tax payers who will be subsidizing these expensive and wasteful whaling operations, and the protests of environmentalists and animal rights activists.

 The president of Kyodo Senpaku, the owners of Kangei Maru, was quoted as saying, apparently without irony that “It’s important to protect marine resources, and we are the ones responsible for that,” He was further quoted as saying: “I believe that continuing (whaling) will benefit both Japan and the world.” He didn’t say how Japan or the world would benefit nor whether whales themselves would stand to benefit from these developments.

Jiji Press. (2024, March 30). Whaling Mother ship built in Japan for 1st time in 73 years. The Japan News. https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/general-news/20240330-177654/