When AI Shows Us We're Not As Special As We Think
There’s something oddly humbling about watching AI-generated footage of a cheetah absolutely smoking a human sprinter at the finish line. I came across this video the other day – an entire “Human vs Animal Olympics” dreamed up by artificial intelligence – and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since.
The concept is simple enough: what if animals could compete in the Olympics? The execution? Well, that’s where it gets interesting. We’re talking gorillas bench-pressing weights that would flatten most humans, bears arm wrestling, alligators swimming (with a digital clock that jumps mysteriously from 09.0 to 39.7 seconds, because of course someone spent ages generating and editing these clips together). The stadium crowds look real. The tension feels genuine. And the message is pretty clear: we’d get absolutely demolished in most events.
Now, before anyone points out that this isn’t some magical one-prompt-and-done AI miracle – yes, I know. Someone spent considerable time crafting this, piecing together generations, editing clips. But that doesn’t diminish what’s fascinating here: we’ve created technology that can visualize our own inadequacy with remarkable clarity.
The comments on the original post were a mixed bag, as they always are. Some people were genuinely excited – “I would absolutely watch the Olympics with animals!” – and honestly, same. There’s something weirdly compelling about the idea. Others got defensive, pointing out (quite rightly) that while a cheetah might dominate the 100m sprint, it would be rubbish at weightlifting. And a gorilla? Good luck getting it to compete in the swimming events.
One user made a brilliant point though: humans would probably lose most individual events to specialized animals, but we’d likely dominate any decathlon-type competition. We’re the generalists of the animal kingdom. We can throw better than almost any creature on Earth – our bodies have evolved to use torso muscles in ways that other apes simply can’t. We’ve got hand-eye coordination that’s elite by animal standards. And marathon running? That’s our specialty. Persistence hunting is literally how we survived as a species.
But here’s what really strikes me about this whole thing: we needed AI to give us this reality check. We’ve spent so long building civilizations, writing symphonies, and launching ourselves into space that somewhere along the way we forgot we’re just clever primates with good endurance. The algorithm didn’t set out to humble us – it was asked to imagine competition, and it delivered an honest answer: in raw physical terms, we’re not particularly impressive.
There’s a broader point here about how we view AI development. We keep asking these systems to “understand the human spirit” or capture human excellence, and sometimes they respond by showing us things we’d rather not see. They hold up a mirror without the polite social filters we’ve spent millennia developing. An AI doesn’t care about protecting our ego. It just processes the data: cheetah top speed versus human top speed. Gorilla strength versus human strength. The math isn’t flattering.
What worries me isn’t that AI can generate these videos – technically impressive as they are. It’s what we’re doing with this capability. Someone in the comments called it “AI slop,” and they’re not entirely wrong. We’re churning out content for engagement, for internet points, for that brief dopamine hit of viral attention. The environmental cost of training and running these models is substantial, and for what? So we can watch a gorilla hit a baseball in a video that took half an hour to generate and edit?
Don’t get me wrong – there’s genuine value in creative exploration, in pushing technological boundaries. But I find myself wondering if we’re using these incredibly powerful tools to their full potential, or if we’re just making increasingly sophisticated ways to distract ourselves.
The original question posed was: who gets the gold medal – humanity, or the algorithm that dreamed this up? I’d argue it’s a false dichotomy. The algorithm is humanity. It’s our creation, trained on our data, reflecting our choices about what to build and why. If it shows us getting beaten by animals, that’s because we asked it to. If it generates content that’s technically brilliant but ultimately pointless, that’s because we directed it that way.
Maybe the real competition isn’t between humans and animals, or between humans and AI. Maybe it’s between the version of humanity that builds tools for genuine progress – solving climate change, advancing medical research, improving lives – and the version that uses those same tools to generate endless streams of engagement bait.
I know which one I’d rather see win gold.