Meta<\/a> indicates the account is based in New Zealand, with the Instagram account originally sharing an AI-generated satirical news account called \u2018Nek Minute News before pivoting to wildlife content. Earlier incarnations of Bush Legend show the character wearing white body paint seeming to mimic ochre, a beaded necklace adorning his neck.<\/p>\nAs of this week, the Bush Legend account has 90,000 followers on Instagram and 96,000 on Facebook. It says its focus is on building awareness and education about Australian wildlife.<\/p>\n
Guardian Australia has contacted the person believed to have created the account, who is a South African living in New Zealand. They did not respond to multiple approaches.<\/p>\n
\u2018Cultural flattening\u2019<\/p>\n
The choice to create an avatar of an Indigenous person has raised ethical concerns.<\/p>\n
Dr Terri Janke, a lawyer and Indigenous cultural and intellectual property, expert, says the images and content are \u201cremarkable\u201d in their realism.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou think it\u2019s real, I was just scrolling through and I was like, \u2018How come I\u2019ve never heard of this guy?\u2019 He\u2019s deadly, he should have his own show,\u201d she says. \u201cIs he the Black Steve Irwin? In his greens or the khakis, he\u2019s a bit like Steve Irwin meets David Attenborough.<\/p>\n
The Bush Legend account says its focus is on building awareness and education about Australian wildlife. Illustration: Bush Legend\/Facebook<\/p>\n
But while the Wuthathi, Yadhaigana and Meriam woman says the engaging videos are \u201cpretty incredible when you look at it as a tool for education\u201d, the creation of a seemingly Indigenous avatar is offensive and carries a risk of \u201ccultural flattening\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhose personal image did they use to make this person? Did they bring together people?\u201d she asks. \u201cI feel a bit misled by it all.\u201d<\/p>\n
AI-generated content poses a particular risk to marginalised communities and could be considered theft of cultural and intellectual property. It also potentially takes opportunities away from authentic accounts, such as videos created by the vast network of Aboriginal rangers.<\/p>\n
A screenshot of follower comments on the Bush Legend Facebook page. Illustration: Bush Legend\/Facebook<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s theft that is very insidious in that it also involves a cultural harm,\u201d Janke says. \u201cBecause of the discrimination \u2026 the impacts of stereotypes and negative thinking, those impacts do hit harder.\u201d<\/p>\n
Janke says it is possible to ethically use AI technology to create content about First Nations people, but it requires the consent and involvement of First Nations people.<\/p>\n
Tamika Worrell, a senior lecturer in critical Indigenous studies at Macquarie University, says the AI avatar is a form of cultural appropriation and \u201cdigital blackface\u201d where a non-Black person creates a Black or Indigenous caricature online.<\/p>\n
The Kamilaroi woman says the proliferation of AI tools without appropriate legislative guardrails means that images, cultural knowledge and stories can be transmitted without appropriate consent.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI becomes this new platform that we have no control or no say in it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot only stories or language but actual visuals of us can often be taken from people that have passed away \u2013 or just blending a range of different people [to create an AI avatar] with no kind of accountability to the communities that these people are from.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s AI blackface \u2013 people can just generate artworks, generate people, [but] they are not actually engaging with Indigenous people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The potential for harm is twofold: such accounts default to sharing the \u201cpalatable\u201d or \u201ccomfortable\u201d aspects of Indigenous cultural knowledge and experience, rather than the more complex reality; and it also has the potential to amplify racism.<\/p>\n
Followers marvel at how the character can get so close to the wildlife. Photograph: @bushlegend.official\/Instagram<\/p>\n
\u201cI was looking at the comments from a latest post of Bush Legend. We see the same racist comments that we know mob online get. We see it again applied to an AI person as well,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Toby Walsh, laureate fellow and scientia professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, says AI is trained to reproduce information and rendering through large-scale data sets with inbuilt biases, meaning it\u2019s not immune to racist or prejudicial content.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are going to carry the biases of that training data,\u201d he says. \u201cCertain groups may be stereotyped because the video data or the image data that exists in that group online is somewhat stereotypical. So we\u2019re going to perpetuate that stereotype moving forwards.\u201d<\/p>\n
Guardian Australia attempted to contact the page\u2019s creator through multiple social media accounts and email but was yet to receive a response.<\/p>\n
The Bush Legend account has seemingly addressed the criticism through its avatar, saying the page doesn\u2019t seek to \u201crepresent any culture or group\u201d. \u201cThis channel is simply about animal stories,\u201d the AI creation said in a video last week.<\/p>\n
It went on to say the page \u201cisn\u2019t asking for money, donations or support\u201d and content is \u201cfree to watch\u201d, and suggests people \u201cscroll on\u201d if they don\u2019t like it. Earlier plugs asked followers to subscribe for $2.99 per month.<\/p>\n
Meta has been contacted for further comment.<\/p>\n
Walsh says while digital literacy can assist users with identifying AI content, the \u201ctells\u201d that help identify it are getting increasingly hard to spot. \u201cIf not now, in the very near future, it\u2019s going to be next to impossible to be able to identify for yourself whether this was real or fake,\u201d Walsh says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe used to believe in things that we see, because it used to be the things that you saw were largely real things.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow it\u2019s not hard to fake stuff. It\u2019s incredibly easy to fake stuff in a very convincing way, so we\u2019re going to stretch the boundaries of what is true and false.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With a mop of dark curls and brown eyes, Jarren stands in the thick of the Australian outback,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-239567","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}