This week, an AI-generated rap featuring Angela Rayner racked up millions of views and tens of thousands of reactions on Facebook. Wearing a gold chain, Adidas tracksuit and handling suspiciously blurry-looking banknotes, it is obvious to most viewers that it is the product of generative AI. The creators, the Crewkerne Gazette, who run satire pages on Facebook and YouTube, have made a series of parody songs – all AI-generated – featuring other notable figures such as Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage and King Charles. With attention from millions of social media users, and even the national press, they are now pushing to get the song to the top spot in the UK Top 40.
You can’t blame them. Low-effort, inflammatory, part-satire, part-commentary “AI slopaganda” has been flooding social media for months now. It has proved to be an effective way to get attention, money and political influence online.
Many of these videos are not clearcut satire. They mimic on-the-ground news reports, depicting interviews with small boat arrivals, or purport to be vlogs from the Channel crossings themselves. In these videos, AI migrants say they have come to the UK so that the government will give them money and a new phone, or that they “already have a job at Deliveroo”.
Most commenters are aware of the joke, but some people are still getting duped. One commenter asks: “Is this real? Which news channel was this on please.”
Early last year, when we uncovered more than 100 deepfakes of the then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, we expected that the harm of generative AI tools would stem from their ability to deliberately mislead the public about facts. We thought deepfakes, doppelganger fake news sites or a voice-cloned “hot mic” moment would strike on election day and sway people’s vote based on a fake scandal about a politician.
It turns out we were wrong. The real lever of influence lies in the mass generation of low-quality slop content.
Last year, in a presidential debate, Donald Trump repeated a falsehood that Haitian immigrants in Ohio had been eating people’s pets. After this, hundreds of AI-generated images of the president “rescuing” cats and dogs flooded social media. One of these images, posted by House Judiciary GOP, has 88m views on X.
It is an example of how AI content can push our emotional buttons easily, re-affirming or amplifying existing beliefs with generated imagery. Practically every social media study since 2012 has found that the secret to virality is in making you emotional – whether that’s angry, sad, hopeful or happy.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, when we were fighting health misinformation in 10 Downing Street, we saw this play out with harmful viral narratives. Hope drove people to believe that you could test for Covid by holding your breath. Anger caused people to believe that 5G masts were spreading the virus.
It is not just our own brains to blame, though. Social platforms directly incentivise the creators of AI…
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