jamesbridleThinking about this too much, so just putting it here: a friend sent me this screenshot, saying "I don't know if this is fake news, but would be a great idea if real" and, yeah, that does look fake - those are AI-generated owls (this world, man).
But I was intrigued, and I know Swift Bricks are a thing, so I searched around, and what I found was loads of similar AI-generated clickbait about the same story, with 1000s of likes on social media etc, all basically the same thing, like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jbpX2NlGUKw
Saving little owls, one clay roof tile at a time
And I had to keep digging for quite a while to find an actual story, and the best I could find in English was a piece about a presentation by someone proposing this at like a birdwatching festival in Spain https://deltabirdingfestival.com/en/activity/the-owl-tile-teula-mussolera-a-conservation-and-cooperation-project/
Which at least got me a Spanish term for the thing - 'tuela mussolera' I could use to search for the *real* thing - yes it exists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIfN_fyz54M
Teula mussolera
And look, it does look like the AI generated thing splashed across tiktoks and reels and shorts and stuff, but the amount of work going into synthesizing and subtly distorting and reducing this - quite obscure! - story into AI clickbait - and thinking: Oh, this is what is happening to *everything*.
It's AI-generated terracotta owl tiles all the way down, forever, folks.