TikTok has banned 20 accounts after the BBC highlighted the use of AI-generated black female influencers to drive users to sites promoting sexually explicit content.<\/p>\n
They are part of a growing trend of accounts on Instagram and TikTok that has been criticised as racist, exploitative and misleading because of racial tropes and language used.<\/p>\n
The BBC and researchers from the independent AI publication Riddance found dozens of accounts on the two platforms featuring highly sexualised black female digital characters or avatars.<\/p>\n
The images and videos were generated by AI but not labelled as such, in apparent breach of the platforms’ guidelines.<\/p>\n
Nearly all the accounts were on Instagram and about a third also had versions on TikTok. Instagram’s parent company Meta told the BBC it was investigating, but did not say it had taken any action.<\/p>\n
The avatars are often shown dressed in skimpy swimwear or other revealing clothing and portrayed with exaggerated body shapes. <\/p>\n
Some have exceptionally dark skin tones that have been digitally manipulated, giving them an artificial appearance.<\/p>\n
Account names include terms such as “black”, “noir”, “dark” and “ebony”. Several include comments about white males in their posts, such as “loves white men” and “why I need a white guy in my life”. Many of the accounts follow or like each other.<\/p>\n
The BBC, working in collaboration with analysts Jeremy Carrasco and Angel Nulani from Riddance, has identified 60 such accounts, mainly on Instagram, that have carried links, or chains of links, to paid-for sexually explicit content on third-party sites. The sites labelled the imagery as AI-generated, but the Instagram accounts did not.<\/p>\n
The research also identified many more accounts on both Instagram and TikTok with similar AI-generated avatars that did not link to paid content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TikTok has banned 20 accounts after the BBC highlighted the use of AI-generated black female influencers to drive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488640,"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-488639","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\/488639","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=488639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}