By Nadia Naffi
Publication Date: 2025-12-14 13:25:00
The new TikTok trend “AI Homeless Man Prank” has sparked a wave of outrage and police response across the US and beyond. The prank involves using AI image generators to create realistic photos that show fake homeless people seemingly standing at the door or in their house.
Learning to distinguish between truth and untruth is not the only challenge facing society in the age of AI. We also need to think about the human consequences of what we create.
As professors of educational technology at Laval University and of education and innovation at Concordia University, we study how we can strengthen human agency – the ability to consciously understand, question and transform environments shaped by artificial intelligence and synthetic media – to counter disinformation.
A worrying trend
In one of the most viral “AI Homeless Man Prank” videos viewed more than two million times, creator Nnamdi Anunobi tricked his mother by sending her fake photos of a homeless man…
