{"id":400457,"date":"2026-01-31T11:01:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T11:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/400457\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T11:01:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T11:01:10","slug":"amelia-this-cute-ai-generated-schoolgirl-is-a-growing-far-right-meme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/400457\/","title":{"rendered":"Amelia: This cute AI-generated schoolgirl is a growing far-right meme"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n At first glance, Amelia, with her purple bob and pixie-girl looks, seems an unlikely candidate for the far right to adopt as an increasingly popular meme<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n Yet, for the past few weeks, memes<\/a> and AI-generated<\/a> videos featuring this fictional British teenager have proliferated across social media, especially on X. In them, Amelia parrots right-wing, often racist, talking points, connecting her celebration of stereotypical British culture with anti-migrant and Islamophobic tropes.\n <\/p>\n

\n She sips pints in pubs, reads \u201cHarry Potter\u201d and goes back in time to fight in some of Britain\u2019s most famous battles. But she also dons an ICE uniform to violently deport migrants and embraces such extreme rhetoric that even British far-right activist Tommy Robinson has posted videos of her. It\u2019s an unlikely life for a schoolgirl.\n <\/p>\n

\n But Amelia has other characteristics that have made her \u201cmemeable\u201d \u2013 namely, that she was originally created two years ago for a computer game as part of the British government\u2019s anti-extremist Prevent program.\n <\/p>\n

\n The game, called \u201cPathways: Navigating Gaming, the Internet & Extremism,\u201d was developed by Shout Out UK (SOUK), a nonprofit attempting to improve public understanding of politics, as part of a learning package funded by the UK\u2019s Home Office.\n <\/p>\n

\n It aimed to educate young people about the dangers of online radicalization, requiring them to navigate six different scenarios using multiple-choice options. Users play as a cartoon character, \u201cCharlie,\u201d who joins a new school and makes friends with \u201cAmelia,\u201d who shares anti-migrant ideas and disinformation before attempting to recruit Charlie to join anti-migrant groups and protests.\n <\/p>\n

\"This<\/p>\n

\n The game was relatively simple, and it was picked apart online for the logical leaps it made in each of its scenarios, though it is \u201cnot supposed to be played in isolation,\u201d as SOUK CEO Matteo Bergamini told CNN.\n <\/p>\n

\n Instead, it was meant to be part of a \u201cwider learning package that allows teachers to facilitate more nuanced discussions about what constitutes healthy and safe behaviors and what could be potentially unsafe and\/or illegal,\u201d he explained.\n <\/p>\n

\n Amelia\u2019s appearance was \u201cnot particularly significant,\u201d Bergamini said, but experts say her being a White, purple-haired girl who espouses far-right ideas inadvertently created an avatar who could be coopted by the online right.\n <\/p>\n

\n She \u201cticks a lot of boxes\u201d for that group, which, in its specific, sarcastic, online tone, memes everything, said Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue.\n <\/p>\n

\n Her role in the game embodies the broad \u201cstereotypes\u201d many right-wingers have of the British government \u2013 namely that they perceive it to be \u201canti-White\u201d and a \u201cnanny state,\u201d he told CNN.\n <\/p>\n

\n And, importantly, she is a beautiful woman with the same views as them. \u201cIt\u2019s striking how many of the edits are highly sexualized\u201d at the same time as similar accounts \u201caccuse migrants of being sexual predators and sexually deviant,\u201d Venkataramakrishnan added.\n <\/p>\n

\n When asked for comment, a Home Office spokesperson told CNN that its Prevent strategy \u201chas diverted nearly 6,000 people away from violent ideologies, stopping terrorists and keeping our country safe.\u201d The local council for whom the game was made hasn\u2019t yet responded to CNN asking whether the game was still in use.\n <\/p>\n

\n The meme first started spreading on January 9, after The Telegraph, a right-leaning British newspaper, ran an article titled \u201cThe Prevent video game that treats every teenager like a far-Right extremist.\u201d Bergamini described the headline as \u201cmisleading.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\n Right-wing outlet GB News picked up the story the next day, wrongly saying that the game \u201cwarns children they\u2019ll be treated like terrorists for questioning mass migration.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n That was \u201coutright misinformation,\u201d Bergamini said, underlining that the game said children would only be referred to anti-extremist programs if they became involved in illegal activity, not for their opinion on an issue. Still, with that fuel and the perception of a British government-funded game policing teenagers\u2019 political opinions, the Amelia meme spread like wildfire.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI think I\u2019m in love with Amelia,\u201d one X user posted alongside a screenshot of the game, garnering more than 5 million views. One X community group called \u201cfor the Based, the Phenomenon that is, Amelia,\u201d had more than 11,000 members as of Thursday. Elon Musk retweeted an Amelia meme last week and, by last weekend, there were two Amelia cryptocurrency \u201cmeme coins,\u201d according to CoinGecko.\n <\/p>\n

\n Memes, which operate as a sort of coded language, imbued with different layers of meaning depending on how much context the viewer has, have become integral to any political discourse. And those that connote hate speech have a \u201cdegree of plausible deniability,\u201d noted Venkataramakrishnan, because they can be defended as \u201cjust a joke.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n As AI allows people to churn out content almost instantaneously, these memes and images can spread quickly both inside the country in which they originated \u2013 the UK in Amelia\u2019s case \u2013 and internationally.\n <\/p>\n

\n Flooding the internet with content like this, which aligns with their world view, \u201creally helps\u201d the far right, said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit based in Britain and the United States.\n <\/p>\n

\n User-generated videos featuring Amelia soon adopted references to other far-right memes beloved internationally. In one AI-generated video, she holds out two pills and urges \u201cCharlie\u201d to take the \u201cpurple pill,\u201d referencing the far -right\u2019s insistence it is \u201cred-pilled\u201d and the famous scene in \u201cThe Matrix\u201d where Keanu Reeves\u2019 character, Neo, chooses between taking the blue pill, which will keep him in blissful ignorance, or the red pill, which will reveal an uncomfortable, enlightened reality.\n <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\n In another AI-generated video, posted on X, she stands alongside US President Donald Trump as the poster calls on Americans to \u201crepost if you support Amelia and want Britain to remain British \u2013 ethically, culturally, religiously.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n CNN has contacted X for comment.\n <\/p>\n

\n Though Amelia is a particularly viral example, using AI to generate content was already a popular pastime for the online right in Britain. It allows them to \u201cfabricate support from empathetic, trustworthy-looking British characters,\u201d as well as simply generate images \u201cthey want to place in people\u2019s minds,\u201d Hood told CNN.\n <\/p>\n

\n He cites one example where a Facebook page \u201cchurning out images of trustworthy-looking British pensioners or veterans talking about their concerns about immigration\u201d was run from Sri Lanka, according to the platform\u2019s own transparency information.\n <\/p>\n

\n And without tech companies clearly labeling such content as AI, it becomes difficult for people to distinguish between real images and AI ones, Hood added, especially if they aren\u2019t already in on the joke.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cOur research indicates that there seems to be a significant number of people who treat these images as credible\u2026 Particularly where there\u2019s an effort to make this stuff look believable, you will find comments that seem to suggest the users responding thinking that\u2019s a real person.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At first glance, Amelia, with her purple bob and pixie-girl looks, seems an unlikely candidate for the far…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-400457","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-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}