“It’s soft propaganda,” says Mandii B, cohost of the sex and lifestyle podcast Decisions, Decisions. The videos, and the rhetoric they spew, are trained on toxic gender tropes. “It subtly shapes beliefs and expectations without offering depth or accountability. It reminds me of how the American Dream was packaged and sold for decades: a clean, … Read more
“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the comment sections on these videos actually, and it does not seem like bots. I clicked on people’s profiles; these are real profiles, thousands of followers, no signs of inorganic activity,” Maddox says. “People just like it.” But even if the views and engagement are real, that … Read more
The video opens with a school superintendent lip-syncing a love songbut he’s not the only performer. AI-generated versions of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein join him on the ballad—a splice between Will Joseph Cook’s “Be Around Me” and a rewrite of the song by Beth McCarthy on TikTok—with Epstein … Read more
Brian Barrett: And also the kind of thing that people readily click through and don’t realize is happening, right? TikTok also now tracking data. Anything you put into any of its AI tools, if you put in a prompt or any kind of info you give it there, it’s going to track that data, it’s … Read more