The stories contain detailed, accurate descriptions of first-person crimes. Most of the facts can be verified by open sources. Some pages have tens of thousands of followers and each video has millions of views.

what is known

“When I was just 21 months old, my grandmother locked me in a 230 degree oven”This is how one of the videos that tells the story of Rodi Marie Floyd begins. She lived with her mother and grandmother in Mississippi, USA. The sound, which is presumed to be produced by the artificial intelligence along with the boy’s appearance, says that the girl was crying from hunger at that moment, and this “caused grandma to put her in the oven.” The video ends with a request to subscribe to the page so that “more people know my true story”.

The authors of this deep fraud made some changes:

• First they changed the baby’s name a bit – actually, it was Royalty Marie, not Rhodey Marie.
• The girl was found stabbed and burned in her grandmother’s oven in 2018.
• When the royal family died, she was 20 months old, not 21.
• Unlike the boy in the TikTok video, he was black, not white.

Despite these inaccuracies, the stories told are still recognizable and hurt relatives of victims who say they refused to allow the material to be used. But in such cases it seems that this is not necessary.

Brutal True Crime

The True-Crime genre has become very popular in recent years. You can find hundreds of documentaries, podcasts, vlogs and text posts about true crimes. Some authors conduct their own research, which is sometimes even more successful than official ones. Sharp themes, with lots of mystery and detective lines, are attracting millions of people around the world.

Many accounts operating in this genre have a disclaimer that the videos do not use actual photos and videos of the victims for “respect for the family”. TikTok recently banned deep frauds of private and public persons – this policy was implemented in March 2023. So using artificial intelligence to create a video sequence with a non-existent child’s face actually saves you from being blocked. The use of publicly available information in the mass media, especially in a modified form, is also not a reason for making a legal claim.

Thus, this whole situation becomes a kind of ethical question: what are the consequences for the audience to consume real stories of horrific attacks and murders as pure entertainment, and how can the emergence of “armchair detectives” obsessed with true crime potentially re-traumatize the world? relatives of the victims.