Artificial intelligence turned Ukrainian YouTuber into a Russian in China

(Artificial Intelligence) A student at the University of Pennsylvania, looked for an audience online but didn’t find it this way. Shortly after launching her YouTube channel last November, the 21-year-old Ukrainian discovered that her image had been captured and edited by artificial intelligence to create alter egos on Chinese social media platforms.

Her digital doppelgangers, such as “Natasha,” posed as fluent Chinese speaking Russian women who were grateful for China’s support and wanted to earn extra money selling Russian sweets and other goods.

What’s more, the fake accounts had hundreds of thousands of followers in China, far more than Royek herself. “It’s literally like my face is speaking Mandarin and in the background you can see the Kremlin and Moscow and they’re talking about how great Russia and China are,” Royek told Reuters. “That was really scary because I would never say something like that in my life.”

Royek’s case is emblematic of a growing number of supposedly Russian women on Chinese social media who express their love for China in fluent Mandarin and say they want to help Russia in the war by selling imported goods from their home country.

But none of them exist. They are generated by AI by exploiting clips of real women found online, often without their knowledge, and the videos made by fake avatars are used to sell products to single Chinese men, experts say.

Accounts created using Royek’s image have hundreds of thousands of followers and sell tens of thousands of dollars worth of goods, including candy. Some of the posts include a disclaimer that they may have been created using AI.

Avatars like Loiek are taking advantage of the “unlimited” Russia-China partnership declared between the two countries in 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Beijing just days before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Jim Chai, chief executive of XMOV, a company that develops advanced AI technology and is not involved in Loiek’s case, said the technology that creates such images is “very common because many people ‘use it’.” used in China’.

For example, to create my own 2D digital human, I simply recorded a 30-minute video of myself, then once finished, I remade the video. Of course, it looks very real and of course, if you change the language, the only thing you have to adjust is the lip-syncing,” Chai said. Illegal or unethical applications as powerful content creation and distribution tools have become popular around the world. Misinformation, fake news and copyrighted material have increased in recent months amid the growing popularity of innovative AI systems like GPT Chat. In January, China released draft guidelines to standardize the AI ​​sector, proposing to develop more than 50 national and industry standards by 2026. The European Union’s AI law, which imposes strict transparency obligations on high-risk AI systems, took effect five months later, setting a potential global benchmark. But regulations are struggling to keep up with the pace of AI development, said Xin Dai, an associate professor at Peking University Law School.

“We can only predict that with increasingly powerful tools for information generation, content creation, and content distribution, they will be available almost every minute,” Dai said. “I think the important point here is that the volume is too loud not only in China but also on the Internet around the world,” he added.