The fine folks at 404media have published a harrowing report on the proliferation of AI-generated "true crime documentaries," collectively garnering millions of views on YouTube — without clearly disclosing the fact that they are blatant works of fiction.
Part of the way this scam was discovered was that a resident of one of the towns where one of the supposed crimes took place began to investigate. "Why wasn't this on the local news?" they wondered. "Why is nobody talking about this?"
The answer, of course, is that it never happened. But their town wasn't the only place where such things never happened, either. As 404media explains:
The plots were disturbing, often hypersexual. They described parents selling teenagers into sex slavery with a sheriff, and transgender teachers committing murders to hide affairs with students. The video thumbnails were perverse, with clickbaity phrasing in big blocky text.
Other titles included:
• "Sheriff Murdered After Affair With His Secretary Got Exposed" with 30,000 views.
• "Wife Secret Affair with Neighbor's Teenage Daughter Ends in Grisly Murder" with 34,000 views.
• "Coach Gives Cheerleader HIV after Secret Affair, Leading to Pregnancy" with 10,000 views.Each one was made with AI and the crimes described did not happen. There was no language on the channel's homepage or in video descriptions to tell a viewer otherwise.
Even more remarkable is the 404's Henry Larson was actually able to track down the person responsible for these videos and interview him. The creator — referred to by the pseudonym of "Paul" in the article — tries to dismiss the questionable nature of his deceptive slop by insisting that "true crime is a genre [of] entertainment masquerading as news" and that his "films" were a sort of performance art designed to make people think about the nature of true crime stories.
I suppose it's a clever retort, if it weren't such obvious trolling. "Paul" is not the only underemployed 20-something to think that he discovered some profound revelation about a popular if trite entertainment genre that no one else has ever thought of before. (Consider: John Darnielle explored the same inherent true crime tensions in his masterful novel Devil House, which was clearly labelled work of fiction.)
But of course, "Paul" sees nothing exploitative in deceptively replicating the exact same "problems" he sees in the true crime genre, and doing so for profit. "If people don't understand it, that says a lot about human nature and their own natures," he told 404media.
Okay guy.
A 'True Crime' Documentary Series Has Millions of Views. The Murders Are All AI-Generated [Henry Larson / 404media]
