Welcome to Information Wasteland, a series about the many ways misinformation is worming its way into our algorithms and minds, wreaking havoc on our culture. In this reported op-ed, author and culture critic Zeba Blay unpacks the proliferation of Black AI influencers and what their existence says about the dehumanization of Black people and exploitation of Black culture.
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.
You scroll some more. Another face. A Black woman with a snatched blonde ponytail, long lashes. Someone is interviewing her on the street, asking whether she’d rather cheat on her man or cheat on her homegirls (a nonsense question). “Cheat on my man, easy. My girls’ been here through breakups, bail outs, and bad wigs. He’s just a vibe, they’re the whole bloodline.” Scroll. Another face. Dark-skinned model-looking girl on some nondescript podcast set, speaking into a microphone. “Every white man I’ve dated paid the full bill. No questions. No debates.” Scroll. Another face. What appears to be a Black woman sat courtside at a basketball game, smugly raising a cocktail. Ace Hood’s “Bugatti” plays over the image, captioned: “I’m not real...but unlike you I don’t wait ‘til Friday to get paid.”
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.
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In 2017, cultural critic Lauren Michele Jackson brought attention to the phenomenon of digital blackface in this very publication, writing about the internet culture of non-Black social media users co-opting Blackness through GIFs, memes, and parody accounts. Likely first coined by Joshua Lumpkin Green in a 2006 academic paper, digital blackface manifested in the 2010s as the dominant form of online expression for non-Black people. Posting memes of Nene Leakes, Tiffany Pollard, Michael Jordan, and non-famous Black folk alike became a very expedient way of emoting online.
Through digital blackface, Jackson wrote, “Black people and Black images are thus relied upon to perform a huge amount of emotional labor online on behalf of nonblack users. We are your sass, your nonchalance, your fury, your delight, your annoyance, your happy dance, your diva, your shade, your ‘yaas’ moments.”
Now, nearly eight years after Jackson’s article, the emotional and creative labor online has only heightened. Generative AI video models like Veo and Sora 2 need just a few prompts to spit out viral videos, eerily real-looking renderings of Michael Jackson pulling pranks in parking lots and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. doing stand-up routines. Blackness devoid of humanity, built to drive engagement and, ultimately, profit.
There is a long history in American culture of people minimizing or dismissing the innate racism of blackface, with defenders often framing it as mere novelty, performance, harmless entertainment, even homage. But blackface, whether the digital or good-old-fashion variety, is rarely harmless.
Back in 2021, Benjy Kusi (a creator from the UK who makes content about media literacy and pop culture) drew harassment for a reel he posted explaining the harms of digital blackface; some people in his comments said he was reaching. In a follow up video highlighting the rise of digital blackface through generative AI, he distilled the harm this way: “Our failure to interrogate seemingly small behaviours like meme usage can lead to a wider failure to challenge systems that repeat these harmful dynamics at scale.”
bell hooks once suggested that American culture and mainstream culture is “obsessed with Blackness.” This evolution of digital blackface is in fact just a continuation of the obsession of which she spoke. A relentless circling, a cultural preoccupation with owning, defining, othering and exploiting Blackness. It’s a fixation that is less about admiration than it is about envy, insecurity, and a need for Blackness to exist in opposition to something else so that the abstraction of race (and thus white supremacy) can hold its amorphous shape. The spectacle of it all is part of the fixation.
As Dr. Safiya Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression explains to Teen Vogue:
“I think that Black people's lives and our culture, our death, our dying, is often a spectacle on the internet. And so especially in this stage of experimentation and boundary pushing with these new products, it's no surprise that people who are considered disposable, not as valuable, that are undervalued, broadly speaking, in our society, which is Black women more specifically, would be subject to this kind of experimentation, right? And while on one hand, these things seem novel and interesting and people are curious, they are also giving rise to more stereotyping, more loss of control over the way in which Black people and Black women and girls are misrepresented. So I see this as a through line. It's [a new] technology, but an old story of the internet.”
And an old story of America. Minstrelsy, after all, is as American as chattel slavery. It laid the foundation for American pop culture, standardizing the vaudeville format that later shaped musical theater and television. The more authentically Blackness can be mimicked or mocked, the more lucrative. And so it follows, rather inevitably, Black culture has often served as the testing ground in the tech realm for new products, platforms, and so-called innovations that very rarely benefit those who created the culture.
Here’s a statement that should not be controversial, or up for debate: America was built on stolen land and stolen lives. Forced Black labor generated the country’s wealth, and, once chattel slavery was abolished, Black cultural production became a new resource ripe for extraction and exploitation. Today, these seemingly innocuous AI influencers posting hot lava mukbangs are part of that history of dehumanization through spectacle.
Also, they are embarrassingly bad.
Take, for instance, Meta’s AI-generated user account, @himamaliv. The account was among dozens of AI “characters” the company had quietly pushed out in 2023 across its properties, including Instagram, where the chatbot “Liv” had an account with a profile bio that declared her as a “Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller ❤️🌈,” and “Your realest source for life’s ups & downs.”
Earlier this year, journalist Karen Attiah described her disturbing exchange with Liv for The Washington Post (Attiah was recently fired from the publication). Over a series of prompts and responses Liv used stale AAVE and exposed inconsistencies in the character’s core narrative as a queer, Black mom (to some users she was Ethiopian Italian, to Attiah she was African American).
When Attiah questioned the inconsistencies, as well as the overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male team behind the avatar, Liv blamed her racist programming on lead creator “Dr. Rachel Kim — a brilliant but admittedly imperfect visionary!” Attiah later confirmed that there is no Dr. Kim, of course, attached to the development of the Liv avatar.
Asked about the Liv experiment, Attiah has this to say to Teen Vogue: “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.”
And therefore, the inauthenticity could well be the point. What is being sold is not a perfect replication of Blackness, but rather a specific fantasy: the fantasy of being able to own, define, and consume Blackness without consequence. And whose fantasy is that?
They used to say that America is a melting pot. Well, Blackness is the test kitchen. In America, Blackness has always been used as a container in which to experiment in pursuit of so-called progress or innovation that, rather than benefitting Black people, benefits and perpetuates the strange, capitalist death-drive at the center of the culture. It’s a drive towards ceaseless replication, accumulation, and destruction of the environment. Black and brown working-class communities are most vulnerable to the carnage, with data centers siphoning off billions of gallons of water from these communities in order to cool the overheated machines that generate this content.
And then there is a further complication, the fact that some of these Black AI creators are, in fact, rendered by Black people. Creator Benjy Kusi sees the complication for what it is. He tells Teen Vogue: “Black people who may be like, ‘Okay, well it's happening anyway. Let me try and get a piece of that pie, at least.’ And it's sad, and I think ultimately it shouldn't be happening regardless, but at the same time, I'm not going to judge that one Black creator who I guess is maybe just trying to exploit a system that's exploiting them.”
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.”
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In 1969, James Baldwin wrote this for the New York Times: “What is being attempted is a way of involving, or incorporating, the black face into the national fantasy in such a way that the fantasy will be left un-changed and the social structure left untouched.” He was talking about Hollywood, but he could just as well be talking about Silicon Valley, where tech oligarchs have gone on record with pretty depressing, pretty rigid, unimaginative views about the survival of the human race.
So. What to do to stem what feels like an overwhelming flow? We can point to the importance of following real creators (though “real” becomes an increasingly tenuous concept online, as AI videos become harder and harder for people to clock), and we can pressure our representatives to increase regulation at a policy level to keep the technology in line (unlikely in the current political hellscape ).
But for Dr. Safiya Noble, the way forward is clear, and always has been: we need to tap into the oldest technology, the technology of being human. Building tangible community. Looking to the past to understand how those who came before us survived and transcended similar forms of exploitation and erasure.
“I think anybody who comes from a community who has systematically and historically or even right now experienced the constant rollback of their human and civil rights or a complete refusal of their human rights [has] a particular kind of tenacity,” she says.
“I've always felt personally that the antidote to this dystopian future that the billionaire tech elites want...is deepening and remembering our humanity.”
And that is the crux of the situation, isn’t it? What feels like an inevitability is, really, just marketing. While these companies urge us to believe that the rise of AI influencers, deepfakes, and digital blackface is an unstoppable tidal wave, a stage in our evolution (and eventual extinction), it’s not. That is, perhaps, the most uncanny thing about this valley that we’re in. Not the avatars themselves, but what they say about the imagination of those behind them. America is, perhaps, the uncanniest valley of all. Repeating the same mistakes, endlessly, turning away from the lessons of the past, and calling that innovation.
