“Sales of Pregnant Ken Break All Records” e “These are Western values”: thus a site near the Kremlinbut written in French, made the headline a few weeks ago, telling two lies at once.
Not only did Pregnant Ken not break any sales records, like written (Who) and pravda.fr, but it doesn’t even exist. The toy, which it’s not a toywas made using artificial intelligence.
Fake news
Content farms and AI, the dangerous combination that fuels online disinformation
by Emanuele Capone
twitter: the fake news about Ken being pregnant
The origin: an Instagram post from 2023
Despite the falsehood, the news was believed to be true by many people, spread online and shared on social media network, where it has been viewed tens of thousands of times: as told in the latest report from analysts of NewsGuard (things?)it passed above all from Twitterwith posts in Spanish and English confirming the choice of Mattel to put the doll on the market and the inevitable “but is this normal?” and “the end is near.”
As said, and as confirmed by one reverse image search done by German colleagues from DSAnot only does Barbie’s pregnant boyfriend doll not physically exist, but the photo of her is also fake and was created with AI: it was first posted on Instagram on October 26, 2023 from The Forbidden Toys account (the post is below)who also confirmed that the image was generated with MidJourney.
instagram: the original post about the (fake) doll
Even without confirmation, however, it wasn’t difficult to understand: the caption of the post talks about “a pregnant Ken prototype which was not produced by Mattel”, but the accompanying hashtags are clear clues, including #ai, #aitoys, #midjourney and #aiart. That was enough read carefullywhich is something that should be done more and more in these times of potentially deceptive deepfakes.
#Artificial #intelligence #fake #pregnant #Ken #doll #proRussia #propaganda
– 2024-04-14 06:25:54
