In case you missed it, last week, the official Google Play X (formerly Twitter) account posted a very odd series of tweets about Sonic the Hedgehog. As spelled out in the first tweet, the point was to show “Sonic, but as you scroll he gets older and older,” a premise that makes enough sense, given the Play Store is host to more than a few Sonic the Hedgehog games.
The thread that followed was absolutely wild. Each tweet featured an image of Sonic along with a caption spelling out what year the image was depicting — but each caption cited an incorrect year (the “1993” Sonic, for example, was promotional art from the 2014 game Sonic Boom), and the text along with them was deeply strange (on that 1993/2014 Sonic: “Ok short king 👏”). The inaccuracies and general weirdness of the thread led to speculation that the tweets were AI-generated and published unchecked by human eyes. According to a statement AP received from Google, though, that’s apparently not the case.
Google Play’s bizarre Sonic thread
Possibly the best thing I’ve seen online all year
Google Play tweeted eight images of Sonic, all of them with bizarre captions that misattributed their sources. The “1991” Sonic was from Sonic the Hedgehog 2, released in 1992, and the caption described Sonic’s debut title as “8-bit GLORY” (Sonic the Hedgehog was a 16-bit game). An image of “1996 Sonic” was taken from post-launch content added to the 2013 mobile game Sonic Dash.
It didn’t stop there. The “2006 Sonic” was from a 2017 mobile game, presented with the caption “He goes 3d again.” That caption sort of makes sense with context: 2006 saw the release of the critically panned Sonic the Hedgehog, a 3D title that followed 2005’s Sonic Rush, a 2.5D side-scrolling platformer. Still, the image was not from 2006.
I won’t go through the whole thread here, but you get the idea. The combination of inscrutable captions paired with images that don’t show what those captions say they do prompted speculation, internally among AP staff and publicly on Twitter, that the whole thread was the work of AI, published without human oversight. Google says that’s not what happened, though.
Apparently a series of human mistakes
No AI here, Google says
Reached for comment, a Google representative gave me this statement: “Our team got it wrong, and we are sorry for the errors.” According to Google, the errors in the thread were garden-variety human mistakes, not the work of AI.
In that context, I think the whole thing is hilarious. It’s not unusual for large corporations to use social media to reach younger audiences, employing social media staff to craft posts that ape the irreverent, often absurd tone that characterizes organic posts that circulate in certain circles. If this thread about Sonic was an attempt at that kind of fellow kids marketing, it kind of worked: as of writing, despite unanimously confused replies, the first tweet in the thread has racked up more than six million views.
Given most of the Google Play account’s tweets reach audiences in the low five figures, that seems like a success for Google. The thread got so much attention that the official Sonic the Hedgehog account chimed in just to ask what was happening.
Amusing as this all is, I think the fact that a significant number of people (myself included) saw a stream of nonsense on Twitter and immediately assumed it was AI-generated is instructive. On the one hand, it’s an indictment of where gen-AI is today: commercially available AI is advancing fast, but even the best AI models are still liable to “hallucinate,” getting information mixed up or fabricating it outright.
But at the same time, it’s encouraging to know that people are on the lookout for that kind of shoddy, synthesized information — hence the widespread AI speculation about this thread. Twitter users were so on top of things that every single post in the thread ended up with Community Notes explaining why each was wrong. Here’s hoping the internet at large can continue to bring that same healthy skepticism to, well, everything else posted on social media.
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