Last week, the Brazilian internet met talk show host Marisa Mai\u00f4\u2014a plump woman wearing nothing but a black one-piece swimsuit and high heels, who hosts a typical afternoon talk show seen on broadcast television. With biting humor and blunt commentary, Marisa presents a set of highly questionable attractions: from elderly women competing to be the first duped in a phone scam, to a mother forced to hand over her child as punishment for failing a quiz question\u2014among other absurd situations. As it turns out, Marisa, her show, and her guests are all creations of artificial intelligence, produced with Google\u2019s new video generator, Veo 3, based on an idea by screenwriter Raony Phillips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The video, edited to resemble a compilation from a real TV program, quickly went viral across digital platforms and messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp, where it was marked as \u201cforwarded many times,\u201d indicating massive reach. Its technical merit is undeniable; the facial expressions, colloquial Brazilian Portuguese, accent, and prosody are so convincing that even those familiar with synthetic videos might overlook its artificial nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The week before, similarly realistic videos were already circulating in WhatsApp groups, also with high virality. These featured biblical characters as digital influencers\u2014Noah complaining about the challenges of building the ark, a Hebrew narrating the Red Sea’s parting live, and the Virgin Mary\u2019s pregnancy saga en route to Bethlehem. The difference in those cases was that the historical impossibility of mobile phones in ancient times made their fictional nature evident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I want to highlight is not only the high plausibility of these videos and their growing indistinguishability from reality with each new generation of AI. Generative programming videos have fueled intense debate about the future of audiovisual media. Aesthetically, they open up new creative possibilities, allowing the production of complex effects at minimal cost thanks to tools that were once exclusive to major studios. This democratization enables linguistic and narrative experimentation that was previously unimaginable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Legal and labor challenges<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n On the legal front, pressing questions arise around copyright, as seen in the case of Marisa Mai\u00f4, whose character was replicated by third parties in new videos\u2014and even used by a retail chain in advertising campaigns\u2014without compensation to the original creator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is also increasing concern about the impact on the job market. The entire audiovisual production chain, from actors to technical crews, editors, and writers, faces potential displacement due to creative automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Virtual sensationalism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But what happens when these videos cross into territory where the boundaries are no longer technical but fundamentally ethical? Popular talk shows have a history of transgressing such boundaries, deliberately creating a gray zone between entertainment and information with sensationalist skits, exaggerated emotional appeals, and frequent trivialization of violence\u2014verbal or physical. As analyzed by Muniz Sodr\u00e9 in The Communication of the Grotesque<\/em>, the bizarre in media acts as a symbolic language that destabilizes boundaries between the real and the fictional, the ethical and the sensationalist. These shows create a space of controlled chaos, where social dysfunction becomes spectacle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, traditional radio and TV, despite their frequent ethical excesses, have always faced some scrutiny when absurdity and grotesqueness crossed the line. Think back to the fierce Sunday ratings battle in the 1990s between Fausto Silva (Globo) and Gugu Liberato (SBT), which led to tasteless spectacles, or the older rivalry between Chacrinha and Fl\u00e1vio Cavalcanti in the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, such abuses were somewhat curbed by the fact that TV and radio licenses are public and regulated. This mechanism, though imperfect, enforced a degree of self-control by broadcasters, driven by the need to preserve their public image, appease advertisers and regulators, and maintain some degree of institutional credibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An algorithmic update of grotesque TV<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The fictional show Marisa Mai\u00f4 precisely satirizes the thin ethical lines media companies are willing to cross in their pursuit of viewership. In this sense, Marisa Mai\u00f4 updates the tradition of grotesque television in algorithmic terms. The use of scandal as a tool to maintain public attention, described by Danilo Angrimani in Press Hard Enough and Blood Will Flow<\/em> (1994), is part of a \u201cdrama of pain\u201d structured around the logic of sensationalism. The difference with synthetic videos is that this logic is automated by systems whose sole metric of success is engagement\u2014freeing the content entirely from reality or ethical accountability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Marisa Mai\u00f4\u2019s video, the ethical provocation peaks when two guests break into an all-out brawl, while the host cynically remarks, \u201cWhat\u2019s great here is that there\u2019s no security and we won\u2019t stop them.\u201d The spectacle of absurdity reaches new heights in another scene, where a grieving woman stands beside a coffin covered in black cloth. Miriam, another host, announces that a recently deceased relative lies within\u2014and that their identity will be revealed live to the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n