A “bigfoot ” baddie, with acrylic nails and pink wigs, speaks directly to an imaginary audience using her iPhone. She says, “We may have to run.” This AI video generated by Google Veo 3 has been viewed over a half-million times on Instagram. This is just one of the many viral posts that WIRED has seen on Instagram and TikTok that portray Black women as primates, and perpetuate racist stereotypes using AI video tools.
Google’s I see 3 ( ) was a big hit with online audiences in May when it debuted at the company’s Developer Conference. Surreal generations of Social media quickly exploded with videos of biblical characters as well as cryptids like bigfoot doing influencer style vlogging. Google even used AI-generated bigfoot videos in ads to promote the new feature.
Online creators are repurposing a trend that was once harmless on social media to dehumanize Black females. “There’s an historical precedent for why this is offensive. “In the early days, Black people were exaggerated to emphasize their primal characteristics in illustrations,” says Nicol Turner Lee (19459025) is the director of the Center for Technology Innovation, Brookings Institution. Turner Lee
: “It is both disgusting and disconcerting that these racial stereotypes and images can be easily designed and distributed online,” he says.
In less than a week after its first post, one of the most popular Instagram profiles posting these generated clips had five videos with more than a million views. The AI videos show the animal-woman hybrids in a caricatured way, speaking African American Vernacular english. They are often seen wearing a bonnet or threatening people. In one clip, an AI generation with a country accent implies that she retrieved a bottle Hennessy liquor from her genitals. Veo 3 is able to create all the elements of this video, from the scenery, to the audio, to the characters, with just one prompt. The bio of this popular Instagram account contains a link that will take you to a $15 course where you can find out how to make similar videos. In videos with titles such as “Veo 3 Does the Heavy Lifting,” three teachers use voiceovers to guide students through the process. They show them how to prompt the AI video tool and create consistent characters. WIRED was unable to contact the creators using the email address listed for the administrator of the course.
The spokesperson for Meta which owns Instagram declined to comment publicly. Google and TikTok acknowledged WIRED’s comment request, but neither provided a statement before publication.
According to our social media analysis, we found that copycat accounts were reposting or creating similar videos on Instagram and TikTok. One video reposted on Instagram received 1 million views in a page of memes focusing on AI. Another “bigfoot baddie video” has almost 3 million views on a different Instagram account. Not only Instagram, but a TikTok account dedicated to similar AI generated content has currently over 1,000,000 likes. These accounts did not respond immediately to a comment request.
A female AI-generated bigfoot says to the camera, “If I die here I better get resurrected using a BBL,” while she is on vacation in Israel and avoiding bombs. “One of the issues with generative AI is the fact that the creators cannot imagine all the ways people can be cruel to each other,” Meredith Broussard says, a professor from New York University, and author of More Than a glitcha book on biases in tech. “So, they cannot put up enough guardrails.” It’s the same problem that we’ve seen with social media platforms.
Screenshot of one of the videos “Bigfoot Baddies”which WIRED found on Instagram. The video was created by AI tools.
Courtesy Reece Rogers.
The algorithm quickly filled the Instagram Reels for our test account with other racist videos. This included an AI-generated video of a Black fishing boat man catching a piece fried chicken while referring to a Chimpanzee as his child.
These AI videos may be upsetting but they are not surprising. In 2023, when an AI-generated video showing Will Smith eating spaghetti went viral on social media in 2023, WIRED senior editor Jason Parham analyzed the video and referred to it as a minstrelsy. Parham wrote that the new minstrelsy would be a cunning chameleon, able to adapt and act immediately, from humanistic deepfakes to spot-on voice manipulations, and all manner of digital deception.
The latest generation of generative AI tools, led by Google’s Veo 3 software, makes it easier than ever to create photorealistic AI videos. These “bigfoot baddies” have become popularized by the ease of creating numerous videos and the constant spread of AI slop across social media platforms. Turner Lee says that AI has made it easier to manipulate pictures. “But the algorithm and its ecology have also made it easier for you to share or ramp up your consumption.”
