Around the Lunar New Year earlier this month, countless videos of foreign women created with artificial intelligence began appearing on Chinese social media platforms, speaking Mandarin and promoting love for China.
Avatars in the videos were created from images found online that were stolen, copied and repurposed so that even real-life women could recognize themselves in the videos.
Olga Loiek is one of them. She is a 20-year-old Ukrainian studying cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania. A few months ago, Loiek started a YouTube channel where she talks about mental health and shares her life philosophy.
Soon after, however, she started receiving messages from fans telling her they’d seen her on Chinese social media. There she was not Olga Loik, but a Russian woman who spoke Mandarin, loved China and wanted to marry a Chinese man. Her name is Natasha, Anna or Grace, depending on where you find her on the Chinese social media platform.
“I started translating these videos using Google Translate, and I realized that most of these accounts were talking about China, Russia, and how good the relationship between China and Russia is,” she told VOA. “It felt very inconsistent. “
In some videos, avatars talk about the value they place on the close ties between Russia and China. In other videos, they praise Chinese history and culture or talk about how much Russian women want to marry Chinese men.
“If you marry a Russian woman, we will do your laundry, cook, and wash dishes every day,” one avatar said. “We will also give you foreign babies, as many as you want.”
Dozens of videos of Loick’s avatar speaking Mandarin were found on the video sites Douyin and Bilibili. Most of these accounts ask viewers to visit their online stores to purchase what they say are authentic Russian goods.
Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, has flagged some of the videos as potentially generated by artificial intelligence. But comments show many believed they were seeing a real woman. One netizen wrote: “Russian beauty, the Chinese people welcome you.”
Loik said that, obviously, she would never say such a thing considering she is from Ukraine, which has been at war with Russia since 2022.
“This may be to make people, maybe the Chinese, feel that foreigners think their country is superior,” she said.
On Bilibili, China’s largest video site, some AI videos using Loiek’s face are marked with the HeyGen logo, indicating that the video was generated on the company’s website.
In one of Bilibili’s tutorials, the presenter even showed how to create a short video on HeyGen that included snippets of Loiek’s talk.
HeyGen is a Los Angeles-based artificial intelligence company founded in China in 2020. The company specializes in lifelike digital avatars, speech generation and video translation.
Technology developed by HeyGen was used in an AI video of Donald Trump and Taylor Swift speaking fluent Mandarin that went viral on Chinese social media in October 2023. Forbes, The company is now valued at $75 million.
HeyGen’s moderation policy states that users cannot generate avatars that “represent an actual individual (including a celebrity or public figure) without explicit consent.” The company’s official tutorial video on avatar creation shows that users must submit a video of people agreeing to the use of their likeness. It’s unclear how some in China circumvented requests to make Loick’s videos.
Loick said about a dozen of her copycat accounts have been removed since she and her YouTube subscribers complained to the Chinese social media company.
VOA reached out to HeyGen and TikTok’s parent company ByteDance for comment but has not yet received a response.
The Chinese government introduced regulations to regulate deepfakes and other “deep synthesis services” in early 2023. The law prohibits the generation of deepfakes without the consent of the user of the image or other information.
Loiek posted her story on YouTube and it was shared on Chinese social media. Netizens on various platforms sympathized with her and called for stricter supervision of artificial intelligence.
Chinese tech giants such as Baidu and Tencent are investing heavily in artificial intelligence technology. One of the most hyped services powered by artificial intelligence is digital humans.
Tencent and XiaoIce, a Chinese AI studio spun out of Microsoft, offer digital human services that can clone people and turn them into AI avatars for as little as $145.
AI avatars have also appeared in online disinformation campaigns spreading pro-China and anti-American rhetoric. In February 2023, research firm Graphika uncovered a social media campaign that used computer-generated videos of realistic people to promote Beijing’s interests.
In September 2023, the U.S. State Department warned in a report that “access to global data combined with the latest developments in artificial intelligence technology will allow the People’s Republic of China to [People’s Republic of China] Surgically targeting foreign audiences with the potential to influence economic and security decisions in their favor.
As for Loiek, she has no plans to quit YouTube or stop posting.
“We need some kind of regulatory framework so we can understand and prevent these things from happening,” she said.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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