AI-Generated Cryptids Are More Real Than Real
thought digest, 02.04.2026
2026 has been a real “if it’s not one thing, it’s another” kinda year so far and it’s only February 4th. Now that I’m finally in the rhythm of pitching, answering my emails in a timely manner, updating this thing regularly — I get hit with a gnarly cold. A proper lose-my-voice, cough-up-phlegm, dry-skin-around-the-nose, mouth-breathing cold. Wonderful. Accepting prayers from any and all belief systems, not excluding spell craft.
CRYPTIDS
A couple of weeks ago, during the Arctic Blast that still has a few states trapped under ice (greetings from Illinois), a guy named Christopher Archer posted an altered Google Earth screenshot to Facebook. The image showed a snake-like shape in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Virginia:
“The Leviathan is waking up,” the caption read. “This is why they are creating a FAKE snow storm and manipulating the weather so they can freeze it because the military bases in the area.”
The post got enough traction to land on Know Your Meme, the internet’s best-kept meme encyclopedia. But it wasn’t really a meme, at least not in the way we usually mean. A lot of people earnestly believed that the biblical Leviathan was waking up from beneath the Commonwealth of Virginia. Within days, people were cross-referencing the Bible, pulling up maps of naval installations, treating weather radar imagery like scripture:
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I’ve been passively consuming cryptid-related material for most of my life. It was always a little silly, even when it scared you, and everyone knew it was silly, and that was part of why it worked. The thrill was in the “maybe.”
The sound of the house settling after you finally turned off Unsolved Mysteries. Art Bell’s voice fading out as you drifted off, half-listening to a caller describing triangular lights over the desert, or maybe some kind of dog-human hybrid out in Appalachia. The inevitable shadow passing by your bedroom window that was either a tree branch or the Jersey Devil. You didn’t have to whole-heartedly believe in Mothman to enjoy Mothman. The fun was that any of it could feel plausible for a second, even against a backdrop you knew to be capital-R Rational.
But something’s changed, and it’s hard to say exactly when it changed.
It’s not just that more people seem to believe in cryptids, though that does appear to be true. (Bigfoot belief, for example, continues to rise.)
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TikTok is flooded with dragon sighting videos, for example—dragons in the clouds, AI-generated dragons, dragons lurking on the blurry edges of photographs—and the people posting them aren’t joking or grifting. Same goes for the mermaid videos that circulate every few months. Scroll through the comments and you’ll find thousands of people who do believe it. Plus, tens of millions of Americans are young earth creationists, which, yes, includes a belief in what we’d ordinarily consider “cryptids.” But the texture of belief, the way the material circulates, the feel of it, has also changed.
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It kind of reminds me of what’s happened with conspiracy theories over the past decade or so. They used to live on the fringes, a little embarrassing, something you didn’t bring up at dinner unless you were a particular type of person always hunting for other particular types of people. Or maybe there was just one conspiracy theory you believed in, always with the self-awareness that it was, well, a conspiracy theory.
Cryptid belief has seemed to have followed the same trajectory—moving from the margins, and at its most mainstream, a form of entertainment, to the center of how ordinary people talk about the world.
In the past half-decade, a lot of people have pointed out that QAnon functions like a collaborative roleplaying game, and more recently, that pundits like Candace Owens are essentially running Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) with their increasingly elaborate conspiracy arcs. I believe that’s true, but I think it’s just one part of the story. We didn’t just spontaneously decide to start playing a game because of the structure of our social media feeds.
A big part of it is that we’re drowning in information. Information arrives constantly without structure, and these stories—whether they involve sea monsters or astrology or tarot or elaborate theories about celebrities being secretly transgender or time travelers or, somehow, both—offer a way to make the feed cohere into a worldview.
Which brings me to artificial intelligence.
AI adds another layer to all this. Not only are people primed to look for and inhabit a story—they’re also willing to accept evidence on different terms now.
The evidence for monsters was always slipshod. Bigfoot hunters could produce images, but they were blurry and ambiguous and required a generous eye. You had to want to believe. It created space for your imagination to do the work. The famous Patterson-Gimlin footage works precisely because you can’t quite make out what you’re seeing.
For a while, digital photography threatened to kill this type of proof.
If Bigfoot were real, someone would have captured him in 4K by now, right? The absence of clear evidence started to feel dispositive.
But generative AI has a different quality.
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You might have seen the images of “the Mariana Trench with the water removed” that have been circulating on TikTok. They’re obviously AI-generated, everyone knows they’re AI-generated, that part is completely undisputed—and yet people share them as though AI has access to a view that was previously hidden. There’s an oracular quality to it. The machine knows things and can show it to you. It’s not literally true, but it’s a type of true, a truth that a lot of people are increasingly willing to accept.
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I suspect the same thing is happening with cryptids. Recently, a clip claiming to show a “White Dragon captured at a secret Government Facility in China” circulated widely across social media. A post mocking the video’s obvious AI origins accumulated millions of views.
But I don’t think the people sharing the original were all fooled, exactly. Of course, some were—maybe even most. We’ve seen how deep that rabbit hole goes on Facebook.
But there’s another dimension to it. Like the Mariana Trench video, many of these AI cryptid videos feel like they’re visualizing something that could exist — like AI had the power to access some latent possibility.
Maybe it’s that AI has introduced a new (or just not often articulated) epistemological category. Not “real” and not “fake,” but something like “plausible render.”
It’s not so much a fabrication as it is as reveal. It shows you what the world could contain—like a medieval illustration of a unicorn. And if unicorns are possible, like the Mariana Trench without water is possible, then maybe the world is stranger than the boring materialist account suggests. The image isn’t evidence that the thing exists. It’s evidence that the thing could exist. And for a lot of people, that might turn out to be enough.
It’s not evidence in the classical sense. The paranormalists in earlier eras had to work with what the world gave them: blurs, shadows, things half-seen. AI lets you generate the creature directly, in full detail, and somehow that makes it more real, not less. The machine might just be a window onto a world that might be, that is and thus far has been hidden.
I don’t think this is entirely new. People have always found ways to believe what they want to believe. But AI has given that impulse a new instrument, and the instrument is reshaping the belief.
Maybe the Leviathan is waking up off the coast of Virginia. The AI could show you, if you asked.
AMERICAN DREAMLAND
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Tabloid newspapers used to print "Artist's Impression" images of aliens in their UFO segments. These Generic Aliens had a "wink, wink, we're not being serious" quality about them...?
The majority of Americans thinking Aliens are real makes a lot of sense considering just how much government bandwidth has gone into publicly acknowledging that the feds see aerial objects of unknown origin on multiple occasions, with aliens as the default explanation for UFO's since Roswell. I could see this in particular being what opened the floodgates on cryptids at large.