By: Eleanor Liang
Many criminal cases involve child victims, with stories or deaths of abduction, torture, insults, misery, and murder that have hanged our country with mystery and their parents with fear and sadness. And AI has been overpowering this information and making fake characters mimic their voices and appearances.
AI is more powerful than we thought.
According to the Washington Post, some social media content creators are using artificial intelligence to recreate these “deceased and missing children,” presenting them with artificial voices to portray disturbing or inappropriate details about the misfortune that happened to them.
Experts remark that “while technological advances in AI bring creative opportunity, they also risk presenting misinformation and offending the victims’ loved ones.” “Some creators have defended their posts as “a new way to raise awareness.”
Two-year-old abducted victim James Bulger was a well-discussed topic on social media platforms. AI featured videos about the kidnapped child in 1993 at the shopping mall.
One said, “Hello, my name is James Bulger.”
“If my mom turned right, I could have been alive today. Unfortunately, she turned left,” the childlike voice says, mimicking James and citing what James’s mother once said was one of her biggest regrets.
“They stomped on me and kicked me,” said the lookalike of James on the screen. “…..threw me on the railroad tracks.” However, even with millions of views, his mother despised that. “It is bringing a dead child back to life,” she snapped.
“It is beyond sick.”
She added: “It is one thing to tell the story, I have not got a problem with that. Everyone knows the story of James anyway. But to actually put a dead child’s face, speaking about what happened to him, is absolutely disgusting. It is bringing a dead child back to life. It is wrong.”
“To use the 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. I think these people must be disturbed. They have got to be. It is not just not nice for the parents to see. I don’t think anyone at all should be able to see stuff like this.”
“To see his little face moving when he is no longer here, it is disgusting. It all should be taken down and stopped. It is not fair on the people who have lost children, or lost anyone. We are not just saying take James down, we are saying take it all down. It is beyond sick. Who can sit there and think of such a thing?”His mother was clearly unhappy about this.
“Our Community Guidelines are clear that we do not allow synthetic media that contains the likeness of a young person,” a TikTok spokesperson assured.
“My name is Madeleine Beth McCann,” says a small voice in another video, showing an image of the British 3-year-old who got lost at a Portuguese resort in 2007. “I’m still missing.” That TikTok video had been viewed tens of thousands of times before TikTok removed it. The owner of the account had written alongside the video that it was an attempt at “immersive storytelling.” Another video shows the likeness of Anne Frank displaying baby clothes before discussing the Holocaust. “Are you still looking for beautiful and self-designed baby clothes? Then go to the link in my bio and let yourself be surprised,” the young girl with brown short hair “reports” in German. “And now I’ll tell you the story of Anne Frank.”
There were also videos about Peter Conelly, a boy tortured to death by his mother, her boyfriend, and Jason Owen.
“The abuse included repeatedly choking the 17-month-old until he turned blue and encouraging a Rottweiler (a dog breed) to attack him. A court ruled that Baby P died at the hands of his mother, her boyfriend Barker, and his brother Jason Owen, who had moved into their home with a 15-year-old girl,” the Sun said.
Another video depicts Gabriel Fernández, a tortured child “who was fatally tortured by his mother and her boyfriend. He died in 2013,” as the Washington Post described.
“I was forced to eat cat litter,” the boy in the video said. “My name is Gabriel Fernández, and this is my story.”
“When I started attending a new school, the teacher reported to social services that I had bruises on my body. I asked her if it was normal to bleed when my mother hit me with a belt,” the image of a boy continued.
(Watch https://www.tiktok.com/@hereismystory70/video/7232194959498038534 to see more of these AI videos)
According to the Washington Post, Simon, a researcher, cautioned that the videos, which are often accompanied by dramatic or sorrowful music or show children with scars and bloodied faces, “have the potential to re-traumatize the bereaved.” “It is a widely held belief in many societies and cultures that the deceased should be treated with dignity and have certain rights,” he said. “Such videos strike me as possible violations of this principle in two ways.
Firstly, they appropriate the personality of the deceased, disregarding or defying their likely wishes. Secondly, they may infringe upon what the deceased’s relatives perceive as their dignity.”
So it looks like, although this AI is popular, it might not be so safe. Until the government enhances AI safety, Tik Tokers and Youtubers beware!
Videos of child victims on Tik Tok.FOUND ON TIKTOK
Sources: https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/crime/2012/03/09/jacksonville-17-month-old-killed-neighbors-rottweiler/15873390007/