Fox News Falls for Racist AI-Generated Videos, Runs Completely False Story That Has to Be Updated With Gigantic Correction
Last week, shared we reported on a huge wave of AI-generated slop videos pedaling misinformation about people who receive Supplemental Nutritional Assistant Program, otherwise known as SNAP or food stamps.
One of the most popular clips making the rounds appeared to show a man-on-the-street style news interview in which a Black woman explained how she bartered her SNAP aid for cash. The entire thing was AI — generated by OpenAI’s Sora 2, complete with the platform’s obvious watermark.
While many quickly identified the video as racist AI propaganda, Fox News apparently missed the clues. Over the weekend, the network ran a story treating the digital SNAP fraudster and other AI characters as real people, using the malicious fiction to stir up anger against the aid program which primarily benefits children, the elderly, and people with disabilities.
In addition to fake SNAP fraud, the Fox story referenced other videos showing AI-generated women complain that their children are taxpayer’s responsibilities, playing right into the biases of publication’s right-wing audience, complete with ludicrously stereotypical details clearly meant to whip racist viewers into a frenzy.
“I have seven different baby daddies and none of ’em no good for me,” the Fox story quoted one of the nonexistent women as saying.
Fox‘s story has since been rewritten almost entirely to acknowledge that the videos are fake, along with adding an extraordinary editor’s note acknowledging that that it “previously reported on some videos that appear to have been generated by AI without noting that.” Amazingly, it still tries to argue that poor and working class welfare recipients are spoiled by SNAP, which provides a cold food stipend averaging just $177 per recipient per month.
As part of the rewrite, the original headline reading “SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown” has been updated to “AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral.”
The videos seemed to trace back to a YouTube account called Buffet Battle, which churns out AI-generated ragebait designed to gain traction by provoking outrage and condemnation. Drumming up viral ragebait can be a pretty lucrative gig, and one that’s become easy to automate with the advent of generative AI.
Buffet Battle has hundreds of these kinds of clips on its channel. Though it takes some jabs at poor white Americans, the main characters in its ragebait reels tends to be heavily-stereotyped, angry Black women caught up in dramatic scenarios. These can be threatening to riot at Walmart — which Fox also reported as news in its story — or stealing tubs of food from a buffet.
In an email, the account owner of Buffet Battle told Futurism that the video depicting SNAP fraud was scraped from a since-deleted TikTok video. The YouTube channel pulled down that particular clip, though over 700 similarly noxious reels remain.
As The Bulwark’s Tim Miller remarked, this would be a ridiculous story for Fox to run even if it were real.
“It’s outrageous to try to nit-pick a handful of people you think will play into the racial prejudice of your audience,” he said.
But the fact that Fox chose this slop farm as its source for a story on SNAP as some 41 million Americans are unsure how they’ll afford groceries is outrageous. This seems to be AI’s new role: manufacturing life-like “evidence” to justify harmful narratives. It’s a stupefying sign of things to come as these fakes become harder to distinguish from reality.
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