Can a tiger ever be a kitten?

Scene 1: A man, carrying a bottle of country liquor, suddenly stops in the dark of night. Right in front of him stands a Royal Bengal Tiger. The man feels the tiger too could be his drinking companion. So he holds out the bottle toward the tiger. The tiger, like an obedient child, lowers its head and takes a sip!

- ANGSHUMAN KAR

Scene 2:Onasummer afternoon, a boy is sitting on a cot on his rooftop. Suddenly, a tiger jumps over the wall and lands on him. But what happens next? The boy’s pet stray dog rushes in to save him. It charges towards the tiger. The tiger roars, but - frightened of the little mongrel - runs away!

Scene 3: During the Jagaddhatri Puja in Chandannagar, as the crowd thickens, a lion sneaks into the town. Not only does it enter, it even stops in front of a sweet shop to eat sandesh!

These are just three examples - there are many more like them. They are the tricks of technology: deep fake videos of humans and wild animals. Using AI prompts, people have created such deep fakes where one sees, for instance, a tiger leaping straight from the forests of the Sundarbans into a fisherman's boat mid-river; or a leopard carrying her cub in her mouth and handing it over to a woman driver standing beside her car. The last of these videos has over 72 million views.

As the number of views increases, so does the money flowing into the creators’ pockets. Those who watch them never question the authenticity of these videos; they are, rather, entertained by them. But do they ever stop fora second to think about the terrible damage these videos cause - to human society, to wildlife, to the planet itself?

Not long ago, in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, a man created a deepfake video showing a cheetah roaming outside his home in the Ashiana police station area. As soon as the video spread, panic gripped the locality. The police had to step in to control the situation. The Station House Officer of Ashiana, Chatrapal Singh, later said, “We detained the boy, made him write an undertaking that he would never do such a thing again, and released him.” But is it enough? If during those few hours ofintense panic, a single weak-hearted person had been harmed, who would have taken responsibility for it?