Yin Chenxi, a second-year postgraduate student, was working on her thesis one evening when her phone lit up with a notification from the Chinese social media platform RedNote, recommending a video tagged with words including “stress relief” and “cutting perfume bottles”.
Exhausted from her work and in dire need of distraction, Yin opened the video.
In it, a glass perfume bottle was sliced in two by someone with a knife. As the two liquid-filled halves fell away, a gurgling sound could be heard.
This would not be possible in real life, but the video had been generated using AI.
“I watched it over and over,” Yin says. “Every time the blade cut through, the sound made me get a sense of comfort, like a surge of energy that opened my pores, zipping through my body.”