Technology

While TikTok has removed multiple videos depicting James narrating his abduction and death in Kirkby, England, many remain available to view on YouTube.

This is fucking ghoulish.

Does this constitute psychological torture? I’m serious. This is so much eviler than what Westboro does.

Christ. I already hate these people.

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.

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.

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.

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."

“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

The 2 biggest psychopaths join forces, true crime people, and tech bros

This is eerily similar to that episode of Black Mirror...

For fucks sake... AI continues to usher in a new age of human horror.

so fucked up

You will never be allowed to die.

🙂

This is some radicalizing shit right here.

Hey i know this one! Isn't a Black mirror episode?

Reminds me of that Battlestar Galactica spinoff Caprica where the dad recreates his daughters life in a machine by recreating her life from her social media presence...

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Now, some content creators are using artificial intelligence to recreate the likeness of these deceased or missing children, giving them “voices” to narrate the disturbing details of what happened to them.

TikTok’s guidelines say the advancement of AI “can make it more difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, carrying both societal and individual risks,” and ask that users who share synthetic or manipulated media showing realistic scenes include a disclaimer noting that the content is not real.

Felix M. Simon, a communication researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, said he was confident that the videos mentioned in this piece were produced using “one or several AI tools,” but could not say which software exactly.

“They appear to be created with some form of AI tools and bear some of the typical hallmarks of cheaper AI-generated videos,” such as an anime or comic-like aesthetic and polished skin, he said in an email.

Simon 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.”

Cory Bradford, a TikToker who has gained almost 1 million followers producing history videos, said that while he generally avoids using AI in his own posts, those who do are likely trying to boost engagement, especially on a platform where the audience skews younger.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

true crime obsessed people are such scumbags

This just fuels my reasoning for not trusting us with AI. Raising awareness is fine and all, but re-creating a lost child only for them to tell you how they died is beyond fucked up.

More of that asked if they could not if they should stuff

shivers

I was tired of this shit a while ago and I'm starting to outright hate it now.

We need to elevate this by creating an industry for entire robots of dead relatives. That we eliminate coping and allow everyone to live in a fantasy world forever