Stuart Fergus, the husband of James Bulger’s mother, said that after he reached out to one creator asking them to take down their video, he received a reply saying: “We do not intend to offend anyone. We only do these videos to make sure incidents will never happen again to anyone. Please continue to support and share my page to spread awareness.”
He really tried to take down his wife’s dead kid’s deepfake and got the creator responding “no offense, so like share and subscribe lel”
Using the likeness of another person without that person’s express permission should be a jailable offense.
They seem to be getting a pass on using copyrighted materials to feed these programs so I am doubting that we would get legislation protecting our own likenesses, or those of our loved ones. I bet you couldn’t even get lawmakers to understand what they would need to write into law. They (american lawmakers) all seem to be so up to speed on technology. /s
Not until someone starts making clips of lawmakers narrating their own crimes and unethical behavior, then they’ll get it done immediately.
Not that I’m suggesting anyone do that…
This is inarguably horrible but the use of AI seems irrelevant. You could make this same thing with any animation tool. It’s the idea that’s disgusting.
Do you think AI is mentioned because it makes the article seem more up to the minute and in keeping with current tech trends?
“A man drew a disgusting picture of a horrible event using pencils and paper this week.”
“Pencils and paper are so awful.”
If pencils and paper were actively causing a spike of worker precarity, a sudden increase in fraud and identity theft and misuse of people’s personas against their will and without their consent, I wouldn’t blame people for being upset at those fancy new pencils or paper instead of smugly telling them how actually
the technology in a vacuum with no one using it is actually harmless.
Anne Frank advertising baby clothes before discussing the horrors of the Holocaust
Wow, that is amazingly inhumane.
My first thought is they’re necessarily making characters who aren’t people. A person who has lived through the Holocaust just cannot cheerfully peddle baby clothes. I don’t mean that it’s physically not possible because she’s dead: I mean in terms of the human psyche, a person just flat-out psychologically could not do that. A young boy who succumbed to torture and murder psychology cannot just calmly narrate it.
So obviously, yeah, it’s quite a ghoulish and evil thing to take what used to be a person, and a figure who has been studied and mourned because of their personhood, because we can relate to them as a person, and just completely strip them of their personhood and turn them into an inhumane object.
But then that leads to me the question of, who’s watching these things, and why? The article says they got quite a lot of views. Is it just for shock value? I don’t quite understand.
Have you met the true crime community? They would eat this stuff up.
Hey i know this one! Isn’t a Black mirror episode?
For fucks sake… AI continues to usher in a new age of human horror.
True crime shows have existed with real (paid) actors in mainstream media for decades. Certainly made more money compared to ‘content creators’.
There’s a stark difference between reporting on or dramatizing a crime (often with family involvement) and creating deepfakes of dead kids to boost your social media presence.
This is eerily similar to that episode of Black Mirror…
so fucked up
“Hello, my name is James Bulger,” says the image in one TikTok video, made in the likeness of the British 2-year-old who was abducted in 1993 as his mother paid for groceries.
“If my mom turned right, I could have been alive today. Unfortunately, she turned left,” the childlike voice says, citing what James’s mother once said was one of her biggest regrets: If she had turned right, she would have seen her son being led away by the two 10-year-olds who later tortured and killed him
Yup
This feels so much like a cyberpunk story. It’s so dehumanizing and has such disregard for humanity that it feels like a perfect match for the genre.
I’m really starting to understand how old people get to a point where they no longer want to keep with the times. This is gross.
This feels so much like a cyberpunk story. It’s so dehumanizing and has such disregard for humanity that it feels like a perfect match for the genre.
We’re ruled by billionaires that read (or more likely just watch) cyberpunk dystopia stories and say “based, I want to make that real.”
You will never be allowed to die.
🙂
