Racist AI-generated videos flood French social media.
AI-Generated Racist Videos Flood TikTok
A gorilla walks down the street with its pet pig, encounters veiled women queuing outside a family allowance office, and releases the pig on them to make them flee. This, in broad strokes, is the content of one of the many successful racist videos on TikTok. An important detail: it is entirely created with Veo 3, Google’s latest AI video generation tool.
The time when these videos provoked general hilarity due to their crude visual approximations is over. Despite some glitches, models like Veo 3 are now approaching a stunning realism. Within hours of its public release in May, social media was flooded with artificial videos reproducing very popular internet formats, from street interviews to vlogs filmed in selfie mode. A continuous stream… often fueled by stereotypes against Black, Arab, Asian, or Jewish people.
“Associating Black Men with Monkeys”
An investigation identified 17 French accounts publishing this type of content, each aggregating at least several hundred thousand views, mainly on TikTok. All the clichés are there. Here, two Black children face off in a ring around a KFC bucket. There, a blonde woman films herself in a cellar surrounded by eight shirtless Black men. “Hi Dad, I’m sending you this video to tell you I’m going to get taken like a [whore]”, she says.
The proliferation of these videos raises serious concerns about the potential for AI to be used to spread hate speech and reinforce harmful stereotypes. The ease with which these videos can be created and disseminated on platforms like TikTok makes it difficult to combat their spread.
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