Police Say People Keep Calling 911 Over an ‘AI Homeless Man’ TikTok Prank

Finally, generative AI has found its purpose: letting kids prank parents. In an apparent new social media trend, kids are creating AI-generated images of homeless people in their homes and sending the images to their parents, causing them to freak out and, in some cases, call the police to respond to the situation.

The basic premise of this prank is pretty simple: Kids use generative AI tools to create an image of a person, usually an unkempt man who looks like he’s come in from living on the street, in their home, and send it to their parents. The kids pretend that the person claimed to know their parents, or just wanted to come in for a nap. Then, they wait as their parents lose their minds and demand they kick the person out. That’s kinda the whole thing.

The pranksters have been recording the reactions from their parents and posting them online, and some videos on TikTok have racked up nearly one million likes and thousands of comments. The hashtag #homelessmanprank now has more than 1,200 videos linked to it on the platform, and there are a number of tutorials on how to generate the images needed for the prank, most of which recommend using Snapchat’s AI tools to create the image. Gizmodo reached out to Snapchat for comment on its platform’s role in this trend, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

It’d probably be fine if the prank just ended there—it’s a bit of a gross exploitation of how unhoused people are perceived, and some of the parents say some less-than-savory things about the people they think are in their home. Now, the situation has broken containment on what appears to be several occasions, as parents in the middle of a panic have called the police and gotten law enforcement involved.

Several police departments across the country have issued statements about the prank. The Round Rock Police Department in Texas suggested in a post on X that a prank in the town resulted in “the misuse of emergency services.†The department claimed to have responded to two calls sparked by the trend, both of which turned out to be hoaxes. “While no one was harmed, making false reports like these can tie up emergency resources and delay responses to legitimate calls for service,†the department said. Gizmodo contacted the Round Rock Police Department regarding the situation, and the department said it had no further comment to offer beyond its public statements.

In a post on Facebook, the Oak Harbor Police Department in Washington said that it responded to a call about a “homeless individual†at the high school campus, which turned out to be a false report related to the same kind of prank. “In this case, students generated and circulated an image implying the presence of a homeless individual on school grounds, which led to unnecessary concern within the community,†the police wrote.

The Salem Police Department in Massachusetts also issued a public statement about the trend, though it didn’t indicate if its police force actually responded to a situation related to it. “This prank dehumanizes the homeless, causes the distressed recipient to panic and wastes police resources. Police officers who are called upon to respond do not know this is a prank and treat the call as an actual burglary in progress thus creating a potentially dangerous situation,†the department wrote.

Several reports have hit the United Kingdom, too, with the BBC reporting on Dorset Police receiving a call related to the prank. Police in Poole also issued a statement about the trend after responding to a call from a parent who got pranked.

Word of the trend has spread to national news, as NBC’s “Nightly News†ran a segment on the story Thursday evening. In that segment, Round Rock Police Patrol Division Commander Andy McKinney told NBC that getting a call about an intruder “causes a pretty aggressive response for us because we’re worried about the safety of individuals in the home, which can mean clearing the home with guns out…it could cause a SWAT response.†Which frankly seems like a bit much, but also feels like a pretty standard American police response.

We’d love to tell kids to stick to the classics, like lighting a bag of dog poop on fire, but someone in California just got 28 days in jail for that exact prank, so maybe just don’t have any fun at all?