The cursed world of AI kiss and hug apps

Apps like Boom AI, VideoAI, and DreamVid are proliferating in their own right on app stores.

Despite their titillating promotional material, they feature plenty of innocuous video templates.

The videos generated are in that hazy category of real enough” to make you uncomfortable yet curious enough to download.

DreamVid is run by Shenzhen iMyFone Technology Co.Ltd. , which also has a suite of what seems to be productivity and utility apps.

In exchange, you get something infinitely simpler and more permissive than all-purpose video generators like OpenAI ’s Sora .

On these other apps, you don’t even need to come up with the idea — just upload a couple of pictures, and the system will deliver what you want.

In a plot stolen straight from The Farewell , my mom died before my grandmother, and my family decided not to tell her out of fear she’d drop dead from shock.

When my grandma started lamenting that my mom had stopped calling, a cousin asked me if there was any chance that I, a tech reporter, could use AI to create video messages of my mother.

After that, I deepfaked my dad hugging me at my wedding.