Short-form video isn't new. Before TikTok, there was Vine—a platform that popularized 6-second video clips and helped redefine what it meant to go viral. The "Only a spoonful" of ice cream skit lives ...

Something strange has been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks. After being uploaded, some videos have been subtly augmented, their appearance changing without their creators doing anything.

This week, we — the two authors of this article — spent hours scrolling through a feed of short-form videos that featured ourselves in different scenarios. In one hyper-realistic nine-second video, we ...