Everything Gets a Custom Skin
PsyopAnime turns breaking news into viral anime clips
There’s an account on X called PsyopAnime that posts AI generated clips dramatizing the biggest news stories of the day in the style of 80s / 90s anime. One of their latest posts details the recently thwarted terrorist attack in which a network of 23 people planned to deploy explosive drones and snipers at the White House UFC event. The story was first reported by Fox News at 6 am on June 16. PsyopAnime posted its 1 minute 18 second video 9 hours later. The quick turnaround time is a key part of the appeal with these videos. PsyopAnime takes a headline that you might have seen in passing while scrolling the feed that morning and turns it into a dramatic retelling in which the accused terrorists are shown plotting their attack in a dimly lit warehouse set to the tune of a synth beat reminiscent of John Carpenter.
PsyopAnime’s videos give me this uncanny sense of collapsed time. Two disconnected news stories, the White House UFC terror plot and the UK banning social media access to children under 16, begin to feel narratively connected as if they are part of the same universe—one episode in a 20 season long saga leaving you wondering what the hell will happen next. Politicians and public figures are distilled into anime caricatures, each filling their necessary role in the series: badass villain, unexpected hero, sociopathic celebrity. Depending on your media diet, you might even see a PsyopAnime video before you see the breaking news headline itself. The videos can start to feel more real than reality… what came first? The news event or the PsyopAnime video?
The anonymous creator behind PsyopAnime recently posted some screenshots of the custom tool they built to sift through sources and create the videos. From the looks of the screenshots, the tool seems to scrape breaking news stories from major publications and rank them based on tuned parameters like “urgency,” “controversy,” and “brand fit.” These are used to create a “brief” that’s then fed into an AI text-to-video tool like Higgsfield. PsyopAnime feels like a preview of a new media pipeline that might become commonplace: reality gets scraped, ranked, stylized, and rendered back into the feed.
I’m reminded of a talk that economist Tyler Cowen gave on the future of jobs and the economy that I included in "Things I Saved" a couple weeks ago. Cowen outlines two new job categories that’ll soon emerge in the AI age. The first he calls “running experiments,” essentially going out into the real world to test new ideas generated by fleets of AI agents. The second he calls “gathering data.” Cowen explains that most of the world is not currently expressed in the form of data, and AI models have a voracious appetite for new data.
Early versions of this “gathering data” job are perhaps already here. A couple months ago you might have heard about the guy who brought a cordless hair dryer to Charles de Gaulle to heat up a weather monitoring device by a couple degrees to win a weather bet on Polymarket. Or the Redditor who claimed to have installed microphones outside the Rockstar headquarters to monitor audio levels near the company’s meeting rooms to try and be the first to know when the next trailer for GTA 6 will drop. The availability of and appetite for real-time data is still nowhere near its peak.
As AI video models continue to improve and costs come down, it’s not inconceivable that an account like PsyopAnime could run an ad-supported 24/7 anime newsfeed covering events mere seconds after they happen. In this future, PsyopAnime could employ an army of “data gatherers” deployed around the world to feed breaking news into a custom tool as it happens. The news industry already has a name for people who do this sort of thing today: stringers. These are freelance journalists who monitor police scanners in hopes of being first at the scene of a murder or car crash, grabbing footage and selling it to the highest-bidding local news station.
Watching PsyopAnime’s clips, I kept thinking about Nightcrawler, the 2014 movie where Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou, a stringer chasing crime scenes around Los Angeles. Lou becomes obsessed with being the first to the scene. He eventually begins to manipulate the crime scenes themselves, rushing to move a car crash victim’s body a few feet to the left before police arrive so he can get a more cinematic shot of the accident. Just like the Polymarket bettor with the hair dryer, Lou views the news and reality itself as something that can be shaped and morphed to fit his narrative. This doesn’t sound too dissimilar to how people talk about social media today. Maybe the difference is that soon we’ll be able to give the whole thing a sick skin of our choosing. Perhaps we’ve been inside PsyopAnime all along, and the “real world” was just one of the skins.