When AI Grandmas Go Viral, What Even Is Reality Anymore?

Summary

WSJ Tech News Briefing
Episode: "When AI Grandmas Go Viral, What Even Is Reality Anymore?"
Date: August 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode kicks off a special WSJ series, "AI and the Blurring of Reality," exploring the surge in AI-generated content—celebrities, influencers, even grandmas—and its impact on our perceptions of what's real and what's not. Host Nicole Nguyen dives into how advanced and accessible generative AI tools are reshaping entertainment, social media, and the information ecosystem, raising questions about media literacy, trust, and the risks of a reality blurred by digital illusions.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. AI-Generated Content: Ubiquitous and Increasingly Believable

• Film and Media: AI is being used to dub movies and even resurrect deceased actors (Val Kilmer performing posthumously, Agatha Christie "teaching" a class).

  • Nicole describes watching an AI-dubbed Swedish movie trailer and being unable to spot the AI manipulation except during one line.

    "If I didn't already know that the dub was AI generated, I don't think I would have been able to tell."
    — Nicole Nguyen (01:16)

• Social Media Phenomena: AI personas like "Granny Spills" are going viral.

  • Granny Spills, an AI-generated, sassy, wealthy Instagram grandma with 2 million followers, routinely fools viewers into thinking she's real—posing with celebrities and sharing outlandish advice.

• Creator Transparency: While AI creators blur reality, most keep their origins semi-visible—often in account bios or hashtags.

  • "We don't try to hide at the fact that she is AI and in fact are more so leaning into the fact that she is AI so that we can do crazy things that, you know, a grandma couldn't do in real life."
    — Eric Cerrez, CEO of Blur Studios (11:16)

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2. Behind the Viral AI Grandma: The Birth of Granny Spills

• Granny's persona is based on real-life sass but exaggerated for digital effect:

  • "The grandma actually pretty resembles my real life grandma. She was always sassy and pretty savage..."
    — Eric Cerrez (06:29)

• Rapid social growth: Granny’s account jumped from zero to 1 million Instagram followers in 22 days.

  • Blur Studios used Google's VO3 to create both Granny’s videos and audio, often with prompts hundreds of lines long to specify every detail (08:02–09:01).
  • "[The prompt:] The elderly woman is wearing a pink Gucci monogram headscarf, oversized pink Dior glasses, pink Louis Vuitton coat... Speech with a rapid fire delivery in a mature, elderly, grandmotherly voice..."
    — Adam Vaserstein, Blur Studios co-founder, reading from their creative prompt (08:40)

• Financial model: Brand sponsorships and a growing market for AI influencer creation.

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3. The Erosion of the Real–Fake Divide

• Media Literacy Gaps: Not all followers realize Granny is AI; many are fooled, reflecting broad challenges in digital discernment.
• Historical Parallel: Early digital supermodels, like Shudu, also drew mass attention before audiences realized they weren’t "real" (10:17–10:57).
• Disclosure Ethics: Some accounts label themselves as AI; on mobile platforms "AI creator" tags are visible, but less so on desktop.

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4. The Impact: Anxiety, Skepticism, and Erosion of Trust

• Expert Warning:

  • Hani Farid (Dartmouth computer science professor specializing in deepfakes) says it’s essentially impossible to quantify how much AI-generated content exists, and most users now have a mere "coin toss" chance of telling real from fake media.

    "They're basically at chance or slightly better than chance at distinguishing what's real and what's fake. And that is a remarkable advance in just a handful of years." (15:10)

  • He warns the real danger is not realizing how bad we are at spotting fakes:

    "I don't mind being bad at something. I mind you not knowing you're bad at it because that makes you very, very dangerous." (16:05)

• Mental Tax and Skepticism:

  • The sheer volume of synthetic imagery creates a "boy who cried wolf" scenario—people start doubting even real events.

  • "I think it puts people in a perpetually skeptical mindset or a feeling that they can't know if it's true. And that... creates a mental tax."
    — Renee Diresta, Georgetown media influence researcher (13:17, 17:17)

  • Consumers may react by disengaging, becoming apathetic, or assuming everything is fake.

• Platform-Level Risks:

  • Social platforms have become essential infrastructure for news, business, and community. The infiltration of AI content raises the stakes for misinformation and trust.
  • Aidan Walker (ex-Know Your Meme) categorizes problems: at the post level (deception, scams), and at the system level (erosion of platform reliability and community trust) (19:12–20:07).

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5. The Stakes of AI-Generated Information

• Innocent vs. Manipulative Use: While some AI content is for entertainment or branding, other, more nefarious actors—state-sponsored or ideological—are using it to sow misinformation, unrest, or simply reap ad dollars (20:36).

  • "We are seeing a lot of this content both for perfectly innocent purposes but also quite nefarious purposes... people are flooding the social media airwaves with fake content."
    — Hani Farid (20:36)

• Who Controls the Narrative?: As it gets easier to create compelling, believable personas or content, the line between journalism and synthetic storytelling gets fuzzier—and trust becomes ever more fragile.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• Granny Spills on being fake:

  "Honey, I've been called fake by men with real faces and empty wallets. At least I'm honest about my filter."
  — Granny Spills (AI Character), 06:15

• Creator on audience reactions:

  “Did she just say that?”
  — Eric Cerrez, on the shock value of Granny’s persona (06:37)

• On technological progress:

  "This is a one way street... It's only going to get better and better and better."
  — Hani Farid (15:29)

• On skepticism and trust:

  "I see videos that come across my feed now and I think, is this real? ... Because we see so many of these folks who’ve just recognized that rage bait is highly effective, easily monetizable."
  — Renee Diresta (18:07)

• On information overload:

  "Everybody’s overwhelmed and ... People are giving up. I don't know what to do. I'm gonna just go into a fetal position under my bed and we'll just hope for the best."
  — Hani Farid (19:01)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:30–02:39 — Nicole Nguyen describes the seamlessness of AI-dubbed media and its impact on perception.
• 03:30–06:26 — Interview with “Granny Spills”: viral AI grandma influencer.
• 06:29–09:01 — Blur Studios' Eric Cerrez and Adam Vaserstein discuss creating and prompting AI personas.
• 10:17–10:57 — Cameron James Wilson on digital supermodel Shudu and consumer trust in virtual influencers.
• 13:17–14:52 — Rapid expansion of AI-generated content; concerns about authenticity and perception.
• 15:10–16:12 — Hani Farid on inability to distinguish real vs. fake, and why that's dangerous.
• 16:33–18:48 — Deepening skepticism and psychological effects of constant exposure to AI content.
• 19:01–20:07 — Aidan Walker and panel on societal and platform-level consequences.
• 20:36–21:04 — Discussion on the spectrum of AI usage: innocent, commercial, and malicious.

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Takeaways

• AI technology has reached a point where virtual personalities can amass massive, engaged followings and even deceive seasoned digital natives.
• The permeability of the real/fake barrier introduces new risks to personal trust, collective media literacy, and platform reliability.
• As AI content proliferates, both creators and consumers are forced to navigate a shifting digital landscape, questioning not just what they see, but their own ability to discern truth.
• The media environment is increasingly defined by doubt, requiring new norms and possibly new tools for distinguishing fact from fiction.

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Next in the Series:
The upcoming episode will explore the usage of AI-generated content for propaganda and how official channels play a role in shaping online reality.

Transcript

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Tax extra.

[Nicole Nguyen]

So I'm about to a Swedish film that has been dubbed in English with AI and I have no idea what it's about. Here we go. Nobody knows what happened to my dad. Okay, her dad maybe was kidnapped by aliens. There isn't a ton of dialogue in this trailer, but if you look really closely at their mouths, you can see maybe that it's AI generated lip movement. But it's really hard to tell. Her dad was the leader of that UFO culture. I'm Nicole Nguyen, personal tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal. And like you, I've seen more uses of artificial intelligence in movies, music and social media.

[Renee Diresta]

Okay, wow.

[Nicole Nguyen]

I feel like my heart rate is 150 beats per minute right now after watching that trailer. So only at the end when she's like, I'm gonna go find my dad, the mouth didn't match up exactly perfectly. But throughout this trailer, if I didn't already know that the dub was AI generated, I don't think I would have been able to tell what you just heard is the trailer for the Swedish film Watch the Skies. Their production team used AI to adapt the actors mouths to match the English language dub for its American release. I found it believable at times. The latest crop of large language models powering what we know today as generative AI are making it faster, cheaper and easier to produce. Movie magic and slop. Now it seems like AI versions of real people are everywhere and popping up in unexpected places. Last year, the BBC used Agatha Christie's likeness to teach an online writing course. I must confess that this is all rather new to me. And earlier this year, an AI Val Kilmer delivered a controversial posthumous performance for the film. As deep, deep as the grave.

[Thomson Reuters Announcer]

Don't fear the dead and don't fear me.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Gen AI is advancing at a rapid clip, looking more and more realistic and becoming more accessible. With each new model. More and more, it can be hard to tell what's AI and what's not. With more AI generated images and sounds filling our screens, is it changing our perception of what's real today. And for the next couple of Saturdays, we'll examine just that. From entertainment and marketing slop to propaganda and increasingly sophisticated deepfakes, we'll bring you conversations with AI researchers, content creators, and AI character and the very people they fool. It's Saturday, August 1st. This is episode one of our special series, AI and the Blurring of Reality. Granny, tell me about yourself. How old are you and where do you live?

[Granny Spills (AI Character)]

I don't count years, honey, I count zeros. I live wherever my jet lands and the champagne's cold. Ask me again next divorce.

[Nicole Nguyen]

That's Granny Spills and she's not real. Or at least not human. She's an AI generated grandma that went viral on social media, has been interviewed by Time magazine and also sat down to talk with me. Or not exactly. This was my first interview ever with an AI generated person. You have been to so many places this year. Coachella, rolling loud, Mykonos, which is your favorite? And where do you find the energy?

[Granny Spills (AI Character)]

Monaco. The yachts are big, the men are rich and and nobody asks me to split anything. The energy comes free when you don't lift a finger or a single bag.

[Nicole Nguyen]

As you might imagine, the interview didn't follow the typical process. I pre recorded my questions and the creators generated the responses for interviews with humans. I don't typically send questions in advance, but made an exception just this once. As advanced as AI tools have become, they have a harder time spinning up real time responses, at least for the time being. Now let me tell you a little more about Granny's bills. Decked out in pink and luxury brands, this grandma is a three time divorcee who got all of her money from her ex husbands. She's loud, a bit of a potty mouth and unapologetic about her belief that women should use men for their money. Her brazen Persona has gotten her 2 million followers on Instagram. As for how many of those 2 million realize granny's spills isn't real? That's anybody's guess. Blur Studios, the digital influencers agency that made Granny, says it doesn't hide the fact that she's AI generated, but if you're scrolling quickly on your phone, you might be fooled. Take one of Granny's most viral posts from Coachella this April. In a series of photos, she's posing with the singer Justin Bieber and his wife Hailey. It's got nearly a million likes. Here's a sampling of some of the comments. You are so fire emoji. Fire emoji. Fire emoji. Fire emoji where is that floral matching set from? This is so wholesome. Nice to see Justin smiling. Wow. The amount of people that don't realize she's AI, it's a little scary. When I saw her first video, I thought she was real until I actually googled it. How do you feel about being AI generated?

[Granny Spills (AI Character)]

Honey, I've been called fake by men with real faces and empty wallets. At least I'm honest about my filter.

[Nicole Nguyen]

While the character is AI generated, the inspiration behind her is very real.

[Eric Cerrez]

So the grandma actually pretty resembles my real life grandma.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Eric Cerrez is the CEO of Blur Studios.

[Eric Cerrez]

She was always sassy and pretty savage, but honestly it was just a character that we know being in social media too, that the Internet really loves elderly people. And when you see this cussing savage grandma character, it's really like, did she just say that? So it was really shock value driven content that we knew the audience would really resonate with.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Seres started his career as a content creator doing street style interviews.

[Eric Cerrez]

What is your GPA? It is a 3.5. You think other people could guess that you have that?

[KFC Announcer]

Yeah.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Then when Genai Tools became widely available, he saw an opportunity to scale.

[Eric Cerrez]

We saw a future where this AI content is. You're not going to be able to tell the difference between what's AI and what's real life content as the technology improves. So we did exactly that. We just hopped on, learned by doing as an attempt to future proof our street interview. UGC Agency.

[Nicole Nguyen]

UGC stands for User Generated Content.

[Eric Cerrez]

We wanted to adapt and make sure that we're ahead of the trend and we found instant success creating, I guess these AI characters. Granny's account grew from 0 to 1 million followers on Instagram in the first 22 days. So we saw growth on social media far more than what we've ever experienced in our own social media careers.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Blur Studios created Granny spills using Google's VO3. It's a video generation model. Like other AI chatbots. You type a prompt in a text box and the model then spits out a video. You can even use the tool to create audio like sound effects and dialogue.

[Eric Cerrez]

We had multi paragraph long prompts describing every single detail of Granny's outfit. The people in the background, the location, the tone of her voice, everything which is still what we do today.

[Nicole Nguyen]

We asked the company's co founder and COO Adam Vaserstein to read one of their prompts.

[Adam Vaserstein]

The elderly woman is wearing a pink Gucci monogram headscarf, oversized pink dior glasses, pink Louis Vuitton Coat with the signature LV pattern and carrying the pink Chanel quitted bag with obvious chain straps. Speech with a rapid fire delivery in a mature, elderly, grandmotherly voice

[Eric Cerrez]

that is literally just two lines out of the probably 200 lines.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Granny Spills is just one of several AI characters created by Blur Studios. While they say they're making some money through brand sponsorships, they're also betting on a burgeoning market for creating AI influencers for other companies, like retired corporate boardroom big shot Nana Nessa.

[Granny Spills (AI Character)]

When your boss says, we're like family here, here's what they really mean.

[Nicole Nguyen]

A man on the street interviewer Joey on the street. What's it like living with your best friend? Even before the popularity of Genai, people have been raking in real dollars from these digital characters. Cameron James Wilson, for example, created Shudu, the world's first digital supermodel, nearly a decade ago.

[Advertising Disclaimer Voice]

Her portrait went viral across social media. It was reposted by so many different people, Tyra Banks, and they were all asking, who is she? And they thought that maybe she was a real person. And this was the very first time that I'd ever thought that maybe technology had gotten to a point where we could actually make somebody who wasn't real pass as a real person.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Shudu is beautiful, maybe too beautiful. She has a dark, poreless complexion and is often adorned with gold jewelry. She's based off a Princess of South Africa Barbie Wilson had when they were young. And while she may not be real, Shudu, who has over 236,000 Instagram followers, is influencing consumer behavior, driving sales of partner products like luxury clothing and accessories.

[Advertising Disclaimer Voice]

People are trusting these virtual characters not as much as human influencers, but they are actually buying from these accounts. They're buying from our accounts, they're buying from other accounts.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Shudu's success inspired Wilson to launch the Digitals, an agency that uses AI to create characters for brands. In the cases of both Shudu and Granny Spills, the creators behind them make it known that the influencers are AI generated. Here's Eric Serres again.

[Eric Cerrez]

At the early stages, people didn't even really know to decipher between, like, AI content and real life content. Naturally, that audience too tended to be anywhere between 20 and 60 years old. So some of the older viewers just had no, like, media literacy or Internet literacy to even decipher the difference. But as the tech grew and people became more adapted to AI content on the Internet, it's becoming a lot more obvious. And it's also disclaimed in our bios and everything. We don't try to hide at the fact that she is AI and in fact are more so leaning into the fact that she is AI so that we can do crazy things that, you know, a grandma couldn't do in real life.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Blur Studios isn't hiding the fact that Granny's bills is AI generated. When looking at the posts on the Instagram app, you can see the AI creator tag on the account and each post, though as of this recording it's not visible in the desktop version. And Blur and other creators aren't exactly going out of their way to make it more obvious. Many posts are marked as a collaboration with Blur Studios AI and many include hashtags like GrannySpills, RelationshipAdvice, Personal Finance, World Cup. Even on a photo of Granny with Leo Messi, they don't typically say AI. The posts are designed to make you slow your scrolling to take a second look. Some are more obvious AI creations than others. For any influencer, the value is in getting you to pay attention. I was nearly duped by one picture of Granny clinking a glass of champagne with a Kardashian. I did a double take and thought, who is this woman? It all made me wonder how the rise of AI influencers is impacting our ability to discern what's real and fake online. Can synthetic images be benign? What does it do to us as it fills our feeds?

[Renee Diresta]

I think it puts people in a perpetually skeptical mindset or a feeling that they can't know if it's TR and that, you know, creates a mental tax.

[Nicole Nguyen]

We'll dive into that after the break.

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[Nicole Nguyen]

The explosion of AI tools like the ones Blur Studios used to create Granny Spills and how quickly the tech has been advancing has rapidly increased the amount of AI generated content online. Do you have a sense of how much AI manipulated imagery and video is out there? Is that a knowable thing?

[Hani Farid]

I don't think it's knowable.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Hani Farid is a digital forensics expert and professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. He specializes in detecting deepfakes and manipulated media.

[Hani Farid]

I don't think we know because first of all, it's a big Internet with billions of pieces of content uploaded every day. One being able to accurately determine what is real and what is fake in the best of situations is exceedingly difficult and at the scale of the Internet is essentially impossible. But what I can tell you is that anecdotally you're seeing more and more

[Nicole Nguyen]

of it and it's becoming harder to tell what is AI Slop. Farid says while in the past there would have been some obvious tells, these days the probability of recognizing if something is AI or not is basically a coin toss.

[Hani Farid]

We do perceptual studies in my lab where we show people images, we have them listen to audio, we have them seen videos. They're basically a chance are slightly better than chance at distinguishing what's real and what's fake. And that is a remarkable advance in

[Nicole Nguyen]

just a handful of years because there are less tells. Like the six finger tell or.

[Hani Farid]

Yeah, yeah, it's exactly why. It used to be the six fingers and it was the, you know, the temporal incoherence. When Will Smith was eating spaghetti in that first video, the spaghetti was flying all over the place and his face was distorted and now it's perfectly seamless and beautiful. Videos of cars. The cars don't suddenly go backwards. They don't suddenly change color. They have temporal coherence and consistency. And this is a one way street. Understand? It's not going to get worse. It's only going to get better and better and better.

[Nicole Nguyen]

Fareed says the worst part of that advancement in technology is that we don't know how bad we are at distinguishing between real and fake.

[Hani Farid]

I don't mind being bad at something. I mind you not knowing you're bad at it because that makes you very, very dangerous.

[Nicole Nguyen]

And part of the reason it's dangerous is because of the sheer quantity of content. It's an information overload creating sort of a virtual version of the Boy who Cried Wolf. To put it more plainly, if you're constantly seeing posts that aren't real, eventually you'll begin to question those that are real.

[Hani Farid]

We can spend the next half hour talking about all the fake content, but where things get really complicated is when real things are happening. People are now doubting them.

[Renee Diresta]

So we've hit this point where now I just say you have to be not looking for tells and mistakes so much as just being wary of the interaction that you're having. And what is the likelihood that this is a real interaction or a plausible scenario?

[Nicole Nguyen]

That's Renee Diresta. She's an associate professor at Georgetown University. She researches how the influence of media works in the digital age. She says now it's easier to just assume everything we see online is AI, but that Skepticism isn't necessarily good, as you note.

[Renee Diresta]

Is Coachella Granny likely. But the problem is we do hit this point where a lot of the scenarios are actually likely. And that is really the issue. I think it puts people in a perpetually skeptical mindset or a feeling that they can't know if it's true. And that is, you know, creates a mental tax.

[Nicole Nguyen]

So we're seeing AI in our ads, in our influencers, in propaganda, most aspects of media. What does this constant flow of AI slop and not slop do to our ability to figure out what is truth, what is not truth? And maybe that question isn't as binary. What does that mean an influx of AI generated imagery do to us?

[Renee Diresta]

I think it does influence the confidence levels that we have in our ability to tell what's real. And I see videos that come across my feed now and I think, is this real? And this is what I do professionally at this point. I see a person and I wonder, is this person real? Is this influencer who all of a sudden came out of nowhere, has a massive following and is just producing effective rage bait and happens to be very attractive? Are they actually real? I don't know. Because we see so many of these folks who've just recognized that rage bait is highly effective, easily monetizable.

[Nicole Nguyen]

But the problem goes beyond rage bait or having another strong reaction to a post. The inundation of AI slope also risks having us not react at all. Here's Hani Farid again.

[Hani Farid]

Everybody's overwhelmed and we're just. People are giving up. I don't know what to do. I'm gonna just, you know, I'm gonna just go into a fetal position under my bed and we'll just hope for the best.

[Nicole Nguyen]

And the lack of certainty is already creating broader problems on the platforms themselves. We asked Aiden Walker about that. He's written extensively on Internet culture. He used to work for a website called Know youw Meme, the Internet's meme Encyclopedia. What are some of the issues you've seen arise from AI generated content circulating around the web?

[Advertising Disclaimer Voice]

So I've grouped them into two categories. There's the issues like the six Fingered One, which kind of live at the level of the post. The post is deceptive, the post is sloppy. The post is deception, scam. And then I think there's the problems that lie more at the macro level, like systemically. What does all of this AI slob content do to social media platforms, which are social infrastructure at this point? People rely on them for their businesses. People rely on them for their information, people rely on them for community building.

[Nicole Nguyen]

About half of Americans rely on social media for news, According to a 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center. And increasingly, that news is coming from creators, whether they're seasoned journalists or fake ones that can be generated by anyone who knows how to write a prompt. Reliability may vary. On top of that, the stakes get even higher when you consider who is behind the AI content and what their intentions are.

[Hani Farid]

Anecdotally, we are seeing a lot of this content both for perfectly innocent purposes but also quite nefarious purposes. And we've seen it across the boards where people either for ideological purposes, state sponsored actors trying to sow civil unrest, people simply trying to monetize are flooding the social media airwaves, if you will, with fake content. But we've also seen it coming from official channels.

[Nicole Nguyen]

We'll get into that and more in our episode next week. And that's it for the first installment of Tech News Briefing's special series. AI and the Blurring of Reality show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Nicole Nguyen. Michael Laval wrote our theme music and mixed this episode. Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson. Our development producer is Aisha Al Muslim. We had additional support from Wilson Rothman, and Chris Inslee is the deputy editor of audio for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back Monday morning with a TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

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