"Prompt Theory" and the Rise of AI Self-Awareness Videos
Tools like Google’s Veo 3 are powering a new wave of content that’s all about questioning what reality even is.
What’s going on?
A new genre of video is making the rounds (especially through TikTok, of course): set in everyday locations – comedy clubs, restaurant kitchens, out on the street – they revolve around people reacting to the idea that they’re AI-generated responses to prompts.
The gag is that they are – generated using tools like Google’s Veo 3, they range from mildly absurd to deeply existential:
“Honestly, the biggest red flag is when the guy believes in prompt theory.”
All of them mess with our sense of what’s real and what isn’t – and to what extent it even matters.
What’s driving it?
It’s the result of three forces colliding:
TECH: Prompt-native entertainment – Google’s Veo 3 and OpenAI’s Sora are increasingly sophisticated – as evidenced by this AI-generated short film made by one person for $600 (of course there’s also a lot of hand-wringing about the potential to misuse Google VEO 3 for fake news, like here).
CULTURE: Pop-culture fluency – These clips are speaking to audiences who are format-fluent, irony-poisoned, reality-TV-trained, and hyper-aware of how content gets made.
PSYCHOLOGY: Existential horror – From Plato’s cave to The Matrix, we can’t help but think about how we might not be the creators, but the created.
What does it mean?
These aren’t just AI experiments – they’re format collapses. Like
wrote in her piece on branded subversion, audiences expect media to mess with the medium. We’ve been trained by TV (from The Simpsons to reality TV), Tumblr, and now TikTok to look for the glitch and wait for the fourth wall to be broken. These videos work because viewers know they’re fake, and they want to see how far the author will take the gag.Final takeaway
The real gag isn’t that the characters are AI. It’s that we, the audience, recognize the structure and still find it compelling – because we want to see how far the simulation will take it.
(And there’s a whole related but separate note about people using AI to generate personalized entertainment, like asking ChatGPT to hypothesize what it would look like if their closest friends were cast in Love Island.)
The self-aware-matrix.