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The internet’s infatuation with AI slop is spiraling, but surely you don’t need me to tell you that. The constant deepfakes of celebrities saying something ridiculous can really wear a fella down. Some joke pages on social media manage to be genuinely funny with it on occasion, like a blind squirrel finding a nut, and they trick a lot of people in the process. This phony clip of a dirt track race car pileup did that and more when it fooled a legit news outlet into believing the crash really happened.

NBC Chicago aired a short segment Wednesday night that featured a video from the Weaber Valley Speedway page on Facebook. The (fake) footage shows an entire field of dirt late model race cars circling the track, only for the lights to go off, leading to a crash.

On its own, that isn’t entirely unbelievable—and, for sure, some might see it as newsworthy. But the Channel Five station missed some crucial clues that this was really a bunch of bologna.

“We later found out the power company in the area cut the lights to intimidate the track owners into paying their electric bill on time,” the reporter explained on-air, pulling info from the post’s caption that was written in broken English. “The track then gave each car in the wreck an extra $5 to go toward repair work.”

This fits in perfectly with Weaber Valley Speedway’s schtick. If you visit the page, which has roughly 340,000 followers on Facebook and 40,000 more on Instagram, you’ll see that it’s constantly posting about redneck stereotypes that are cranked up to 11. Every once in a while, they post something fairly believable, but most of their clips are obviously satire (albeit extraordinarily well-done). Surely, if NBC Chicago had seen the video of a NASA space shuttle crashing on the track or a possum smoking a cigarette while giving the camera a thumbs up, they would’ve known this clip was fake, too.

The Weaber Valley Speedway page is run by Howard Weaver, and I was able to talk to him on the phone about this evening news snafu.

“The way he said that with a straight face,” Weaver laughed, talking about the newscaster believing the backstory. When a friend sent him a recording of the news clip, he wondered if it was real or AI. “You can’t trust anything nowadays,” he quipped.

Weaver told me he made the clip with OpenAI’s new Sora 2 video generator. He said it’s the best tool right now for making hyper-realistic clips, but it requires a lot of coaching to make something as clean as the power outage video.

“My prompt for a single video like that is probably three paragraphs long,” Weaver said. “I’m not just saying, ‘Do a video of the power going out at the dirt track and then a car crash.’ I’m typing file names for it to use, to make it look like a cell phone video, like, ‘Shaky handheld iPhone 11 video recorded from the bleachers’ and blah blah blah.”

“I’m like practically writing a book to get a 10-second video,” Weaver continued.

Weaber Valley has grown into one of the largest dirt track pages on Facebook, only trailing big ones like Eldora Speedway in follower count, and it’s not even real. A lot of people are in on the joke as a result, but there are still droves of people who get fooled. The hysteria will only spread as models like Sora improve with each passing update.

“I have mixed feelings about it because it’s kind of scary, but it’s funny, but then it’s also scary,” Weaver said. “I think social media is going to be killed by this.”

Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad after all, but this story isn’t really about that.

Got a tip or question for the author? Contact them directly: caleb@thedrive.com

From running point on new car launch coverage to editing long-form features and reviews, Caleb does some of everything at The Drive. And he really, really loves trucks.