AI Videos of Black Women Depicted as Primates Are Going Viral
An AI-generated 'bigfoot baddie,' with acrylic nails and a pink wig, speaks directly to her imaginary audience using an iPhone. 'We might have to go on the run,' she says. 'I'm wanted for a false report on my baby daddy.' This AI video, generated by Google's Veo 3, has racked up over a million views on Instagram. It's just one of many viral posts on Instagram and TikTok viewed by WIRED that depict Black women as primates and perpetuate racist tropes using AI video tools.
Google's Veo 3 was a hit with online audiences when it dropped at the company's developer conference in May. Surreal generations of Biblical characters and cryptids, like bigfoot, doing influencer-style vlogging quickly spread across social media. AI-generated bigfoot vlogs were even used by Google as a selling point in ads promoting the new feature.
With 'bigfoot baddies,' online creators are taking what was a fairly innocuous trend on social media and repurposing it to dehumanize Black women. 'There's a historical precedent behind why this is offensive. In the early days of slavery, Black people were overexaggerated in illustrations to emphasize primal characteristics,' says Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution.
'It's both disgusting and disturbing that these racial tropes and images are readily available to be designed and distributed on online platforms,' says Turner Lee.
One of the most popular Instagram accounts posting these generated clips has five videos with over a million views, less than a month after the account's first post. The AI videos feature the animal-woman hybrids speaking African American Vernacular English in a caricatured manner, with the characters often shown wearing a bonnet and threatening to fight people. In one clip, the AI generation, using a country accent, implies she pulled out a bottle of Hennessy liquor that was stored in her genitals.
Veo 3 can create everything seen in videos like this, the scenery to the spoken audio to the characters themselves, from a single prompt. The bio of the popular Instagram account includes a link to a $15 online course where you can learn how to create similar videos. In videos with titles like 'Veo 3 does the heavy lifting,' three teachers use voiceover to step students through the process of prompting the AI video tool for bigfoot clips and creating consistent characters. The email address listed as the administrator of the online course bounced back messages when WIRED attempted to contact the creators.
A spokesperson for Meta, which owns Instagram, declined to comment on the record. Google and TikTok both acknowledged WIRED's request for comment, but did not provide a statement prior to publication.
Our social media analysis found copycat accounts on Instagram and TikTok reposting the 'bigfoot baddie' clips or generating similar videos. A repost of one video on Instagram has 1 million views on an AI-focused meme page. A different Instagram account has another 'bigfoot baddie' video with almost 3 million views. It's not just on Instagram; an account on TikTok dedicated to similar AI-generated content currently has over 1 million likes. These accounts did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
'If I die here, I better get resurrected with a BBL,' says an AI-generated female bigfoot on a different account, talking to the camera as she dodges bombs while vacationing in Israel. 'One of the problems with generative AI is that the creators of AI tools cannot conceive of all of the ways that people can be horrible to each other,' says Meredith Broussard, a professor at New York University and author of More Than a Glitch , a book about biases in technology. 'So, they can't put up a sufficient number of guardrails. It's exactly the same problem we've seen on social media platforms.'
A screenshot of one of the 'Bigfoot Baddies' videos WIRED found on Instagram. The video was generated by AI tools. Courtesy of Reece Rogers
After clicking on a few of the female bigfoot videos, the Instagram Reels feed for our test account was soon filled by the algorithm with other racist videos—including an AI generation of a Black man on a fishing boat excitedly catching a piece of fried chicken and referring to a chimpanzee as his son.
While these AI videos are upsetting, they are not necessarily surprising. Back in 2023, as an AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti was going viral on social media, WIRED senior writer Jason Parham dissected the video as a form of minstrelsy. 'This coming age of new minstrelsy will assume an even more cunning chameleon form, adaptive and immediate in its guile, from humanistic deepfakes and spot-on voice manipulations to all manner of digital deceit,' Parham wrote at the time.
With this latest wave of generative AI video tools, helmed by Google's Veo 3, it's never been easier to produce photorealistic AI videos. The ease of generating numerous videos paired with the consistent spread of AI slop on social media platforms is part of what's popularized these 'bigfoot baddies.' More social media trends where creators use AI to attack minority groups will likely continue. 'AI has not only made it easier to manipulate images,' Turner Lee says. 'But the algorithm itself, and the ecology of the algorithm, has also made it easier to share or to ramp up your consumption of this content.'
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