- TikTok has been testing AI summaries for its videos
- The feature throws up wildly inaccurate text captions
- TikTok says it will now pull back on the technology
In the age of AI deepfakes, it’s a good idea to treat everything you see on social media with a degree of skepticism, but the misinformation problem on TikTok has gotten worse with some wildly inaccurate AI captions — and it’s bad enough that the video platform is now scaling back this captioning technology.
As reported by Business Insider, TikTok had been testing AI-powered text summaries for videos with a limited number of users. However, after several failures and hallucinations, the technology will be limited to identifying products in videos, rather than fully describing the content of the video.
These mistakes and hallucinations included describing a video of celebrity Charli D’Amelio talking to the camera as showing a “collection of different blueberries with different toppings” and labeling a dog training video as “a mesmerizing display of intricate origami art, carefully folded from a single sheet”.
You don’t have to look far on social media to find additional examples: there’s what appears to be a photo of two cats with the caption “a person demonstrating an impressive new robotic arm with multiple dexterous fingers,” for example.
‘Trash that has nothing to do with the video’
super glad tiktok added this new ai overview feature. not sure how i would survive the app without it. pic.twitter.com/Y5P31nridi3 May 2026
It’s not clear exactly what has gone wrong that causes TikTok’s AI resumes to get the wrong idea so regularly (though the feature presumably worked at least some of the time). Recognizing the content of images and videos is usually something AI can do fairly reliably.
However, that clearly hasn’t been the experience for many TikTok users. One Redditor described the captions as “completely off the rails”, while another said they saw “garbage that has nothing to do with the video” – with the AI summary also serving to distract from the actual caption on the video.
Other examples online show a Kentucky Derby horse racing video described as “showcasing an intricate piece of calligraphy”, and a cooking video with an overhead shot of a gray pan labeled “a single ball bouncing and rolling on a green surface” – although of course these screenshots could also be fakes.
Although AI is being pushed into more and more of our apps and devices, hallucinations and errors remain a significant problem that AI companies don’t like to admit. Whether it’s a TikTok video or a legal document, if you get AI to summarize something, you’d be wise to run additional checks.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds.
