By: Annabelle Ma

Thanks to recent advances in artificial intelligence, some content creators are generating voices of deceased or missing children to make videos that describe the trauma that happened to them. Experts say that these voices provide misinformation and offend the victim’s loved ones.

“Hello, my name is James Bulger,” says the image in one TikTok video that depicted the British two-year-old who was abducted in a supermarket. “If my mom turned right, I could have been alive today. Unfortunately, she turned left,” the voice said.

TikTok has attempted to remove videos about James narrating his death, but many are still able to be viewed on YouTube.

Denis Fergus, James’s mother, told the Daily Mirror that the posts were “disgusting.”

“To use a face and a moving mouth of a child who is no longer here who has been brutally taken away from us, there are no words,” she told the newspaper.

Felix M. Simon, a communication researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, said that the production of the voices in the video are becoming easier due to AI and its applications becoming cheaper and easier to use.

AI is now able to imitate people’s voices with precision. However, the childlike voices in these videos appear to be computer generated and not based on the victim’s real voice.

On social media, emotional content is more popular- especially content that is proactive, morbid, and outrageous.

Cody Bradford, a TikToker who has gained almost 1 million followers from producing history videos, says that many people who try to boost engagement use AI. “I suspect those using AI to make these recreations are doing so for shock and awe to generate high view counts,” he said.

According to Bradford, as of now, AI technology hasn’t been that realistic.

But “it’s getting there,” he said. “And it will be there soon. And we all have to deal with consequences of what that’s going to lead to.”

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/09/ai-dead-children-tiktok-videos/