In the short clip set to bouncy music, three people can be seen hard at work shoveling their driveway while . . . riding on unicycles. One of them was wearing a jester hat, its tassels bouncing as he pedaled.
Good, clean fun on a local Facebook page, it seemed.
But something about the clip seemed off.
I’m a reporter, so I’m skeptical by nature. My eyes were drawn to the uncanny nature of what I was seeing. Did the herky-jerky movements of the people on the unicycles seem human, or robotic? Did the oddly shaped shovel one of them is holding look somehow wrong?
And come to think of it, wasn’t a scene of a jester and his family shoveling snow on unicycles exactly the kind of thing you’d expect someone to type into an AI generator as a prompt?
These days, you can’t be too careful. Tools like OpenAI’s Sora have gotten shockingly good incredibly quickly. They make videos that look extremely realistic.
Phony clips of rabbits jumping on a trampoline that are meant to go viral for being cute, or fake conversations about food stamps designed to stoke outrage, have spread far and wide on social media, deceiving even people who thought themselves immune to the trickery of AI.
At a time when video evidence is at the center of how much of the public interprets the highest stakes news events, it really matters what’s real and what isn’t.
So about the video purporting to show a shoveling unicycle rider.
I asked some journalist colleagues at the Globe. Some were on the fence about whether the feat they were seeing was real or computer generated. Some were convinced it had all the hallmarks of a fake.
One publicly available AI detection tool, called AI or Not, was little help. Asked to analyze the video, it concluded it had a 51 percent chance of being made artificially. A coin flip.
Reached via Facebook, the person who posted the video insisted it was real.
“No AI,” wrote the poster, who said he was a Somerville resident named Alex Feldman, in a message. “We really did this.”
He seemed sincere enough, but trolls work in mysterious ways and with mysterious aims.
The only thing left to do was to see the supposed act in person. As good as AI has gotten, it can’t (yet) produce a snow-shoveling unicycler in the flesh.
So to distinguish himself from robot kind once and for all, Feldman agreed to meet a reporter Tuesday at his Somerville home.
He stepped out of a house near Powder House Square in a jester hat, like he’d been wearing in the Facebook video, and holding a unicycle in his hand. A good start.
He hopped aboard a lime-green unicycle, steadying himself with a shovel as he found equilibrium, and off he went.
About as effortlessly as was possible, given the slick surfaces and mounds of slush every which way, he steered it up and down his driveway, and back and forth on the sidewalks, with a speed and deftness that seemed unnatural.
He was too good, one might say. Like how a computer with only a computer’s understanding of human capacity might depict it.
By the time he actually got to demonstrating the unicycle shoveling routine, which he was able to recreate with ease, there was no doubting it: Feldman’s skills were not AI-generated.
He comes by them the old-fashioned way.
“There’s some more efficient ways” to shovel a driveway, he joked, “but there’s also a lot of less efficient ways, such as the pogo stick. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Feldman has a long history with the unicycle, which he said was his “gateway drug” into the performing arts. He now works professionally under the stage name Alex the Jester, and is a comic and in-demand expert at juggling, balancing delicate objects, dual flute-playing, and other feats.
In years past, you may have seen him at the King Richard’s Faire, which is where he got his start. In a few weeks, you can catch him at a comedy revue he is organizing at a Harvard Square comedy club.
He is also known in his Somerville neighborhood for using the unicycle to do routine chores, like grabbing essentials at the store up the street. In part for a laugh, and in part because, he insists, it’s sometimes more convenient than traveling by bike, as a unicycle is lightweight and can be easily carried.
He shares his passions with his family: The two other people who are unicycling while wielding shovels in the Facebook video are his sons.
All of which is to say, you shouldn’t necessarily trust what you see in videos posted online. But if you happen to watch a clip of a jovial Somerville dad improbably doing a household task on Facebook atop a unicycle, a pogo stick, or some other vehicle better suited to a circus than a driveway, there is a decent chance it’s real.
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.
