If you’ve been on TikTok recently, you will have seen everyone talking about the Opium Bird — but is it real or fake?
The creepy creature is one of the internet’s biggest mems right now, but some social media users are a little confused.
The Opium Bird is a scary animal that’s really tall and human-like but has a bird’s face and is covered in huge feathers.
It’s grey and white in color, lives in the snow and has a really long beak. The species’ black eyes peer right into your soul.
Videos of the animal were first shared by a TikTok user called Dre on September 12 who wrote: “Bird-like beings discovered in an Antarctic mountain range.
The Opium Bird if fake. The TikTok user, who has the handle @drevfx, made the creature using artificial intelligence.
They were not found in Antarctica and don’t come from 2027 as some of the memes suggest — the whole thing is a hoax.
However, it seems as though many were fooled, with one person writing on Twitter: “Okay seriously is the Opium Bird real or fake?”
“Why did I think this was real until I spent an hour researching Antarctica?” another added on TikTok.
The phoney creature has gone viral on social media and left people creeped out by its scary appearance.
Someone tweeted: “When James showed me the opium bird and I just wanted to cry why is he so scary.”
“Others “They look like they would sacrifice me on a cliff side and chant over a fire,” another said.
However, others think they’re majestic and peaceful — and some even want one as a pet!
The Opium Bird if fake. Artificial intelligence was used by the @drevfx TikTok user to create the creature.
You may have noticed that everyone is talking about the Opium Bird on TikTok lately. But is it real or fake?
On September 12, a user named Dre posted videos of the animal to TikTok, writing, “Bird-like beings discovered in an Antarctic mountain range.”
It has a very long beak, is grey and white in color, and lives in the snow. The species’ black eyes peer right into your soul.
On TikTok, another person commented, “Why did I think this is real until I spent an hour researching Antarctica?”
Erosion Bird plays with the unpredictability and incoherence created by AI: the bird appears in each meme slightly differently, and the strangeness of the medium corresponds with the strangeness of the creature.
A shaggy, white-furred bird at least eight feet tall stands in a desolate polar landscape. A soundtrack of strange clicks and mechanical whirs plays over grainy footage of a human cautiously approaching the creature. “Luh calm fit,” reads the text spliced over the frame, a phrase coined by fashion influencers on TikTok last summer to describe a comfortable outfit. Scrolling onto the next TikTok feels a little like walking out of the screening room in the museum after seeing an experimental film installation you didn’t fully understand.
Memes lack the authorial anchoring of other works of art — anybody can take a post and riff on it, and so Erosion Bird has journeyed through several different corners of TikTok. Many postings claim the creature represents a “meme from the future” that we can’t yet understand, and some warn of a vague, sinister disaster soon to come — perhaps climate-related, or perhaps political. These postings have taken on an increasingly paranoid slant, including cryptic listings of longitude and latitude coordinates alongside warnings of an imminent cataclysm.
Solitary cryptids, conceived by online artists and elaborated through a communal process, have been beloved meme figures since at least the days of the SCP Foundation wiki and Slenderman in the early 2010s. Erosion Bird, first posted by user @drevfx, works and circulates in the same way, but on TikTok. While it draws from a deep well of lore, the story of Erosion Bird is also profoundly 2023. It’s the latest in a wave of memes generated by AI, a technology that has allowed creators to produce ever-more intricate content with relative ease.
In the 1870s, the new manufacture of premixed paint in portable tubes accompanied the development of plein air painting: Because of the new technology, Impressionists like Berthe Morisot and Claude Monet could go outdoors and capture a passing tint of natural light without needing to mix pigments by hand. Art reflects technological advances in -making, and meme trends like Erosion Bird (while definitely less significant for humanity, at least for now, than Impressionism) follow this pattern. Without AI generation and the network effects of TikTok, which allowed it to be cross-influenced by other meme trends like online cryptids, conspiracy aesthetics, and “luh calm fit” fashion posting, Erosion Bird wouldn’t have happened. It reflects this new age in -making and culture — and there’s only more weirdness to come.
FAQ
What is the erosion bird lore?