Zeba Blay, for Teen Vogue:

You’re doomscrolling. On TikTok, or Instagram, or YouTube, or some other equally distracting online platform. In between harrowing news stories pointing to the nation’s decline, clips from balloon-popping dating shows, and ads for the latest viral lipstain, you see a face. The face may give you pause. This is because what you are looking at is only the concept of a face: a Black woman, perhaps in her mid-20s, with glowing brown skin, immaculate brows, slicked down baby hairs, and sharp acrylic nails on her fingers.

“Get ready with me,” she says, “I need to go shopping. I have to find some clothes for my Miami trip. I’m thinking about wearing this little tan Skims…” She heads to the mall. She goes to Zara. “I found four outfits, I still need two more. But the four I found are definitely tea.” She is not a real person. […]

And here we are, at the end of everything: the uncanny valley of Black generative AI influencers. A vast wilderness of hyperrealistic avatars doing mukbangs, wig installs, and calling us broke. Like all digital blackface, they implicitly play into racialized stereotypes of Blackness, particularly Black femininity. Digital blackface has evolved, or rather adapted, to the demands of late-as-hell stage capitalism. What once lived in the pixels of reaction GIFs and memes has now transformed into something slicker, though no less insidious — the continuation of a long, wearying American tradition of stealing Black expression and exploiting it for profit.

I read this article as part of Karen Attiah’s ongoing Race Media and International Affairs class that she liberated after it was canceled by Columbia.

Attiah herself is quoted in this piece, in reference to her conversation with “Liv,” Meta’s “Proud Black Queer Momma” chat character:

“Some people reacted to my questioning saying ‘Oh it reveals the racism of its creators, it reveals so much about the tech industry.’ Yeah, that’s true, but you guys are assuming that revealing these things means that it will bring these people shame. They’re still going on. Liv is still active.”

“It’s important to remember that Meta said they weren’t doing this to increase people’s trust in reality,” she adds. “They weren’t doing this because they wanted to educate people. Their term was engagement. And what does engagement mean? It means more money, more eyes on their platform. So if they can use Blackness to extract our attention, even if it’s negative attention, they still win.”

The article isn’t just about non-Black people appropriating Blackness via fake Black AI personas, however. Real Black people are doing it too, in an effort, suggests UK media literacy and pop culture creator Benjy Kusi, to “exploit a system that’s exploiting them.”

The article’s author, Blay, again:

In that sense, this is not just about the perils of AI, the dangers of generating hyperreal imagery of fake Black people without regulation or transparency. This is also about the economy of influence itself, and economy that is, by design, structured to keep us all in endless loops of exploitation as a means of survival. And what does it mean to survive within an ecosystem where Blackness is extracted for profit without the necessity of paying or giving fair working conditions to real Black people?

“To me it’s digital slavery,” Karen Attiah says. “Because AI won’t revolt. It’s programmed.”