AI Deepfakes of True-Crime Victims Are a Waking Nightmare

“Grandma locked me in an oven at 230 degrees when I was just 21 months old,” the cherubic baby with giant blue eyes and a floral headband says in the TikTok video. The baby, who speaks in an adorably childish voice atop the plaintive melody of Dylan Mathew‘s “Love Is Gone,” identifies herself as Rody Marie Floyd, a little girl who lived with her mother and grandmother in Mississippi. She recounts that one day, she was hungry and wouldn’t stop crying, prompting her grandmother to put her in the oven, leading to her death. “Please follow me so more people know my true story,” the baby says at the end of the video.

The baby in the video is, of course, not real: She’s an AI-generated creation posted on @truestorynow, an account with nearly 50,000 followers that posts videos of real-life crime victims telling their stories. The gruesome story she’s telling is true, albeit to a point. The baby’s name wasn’t Rody Marie, but Royalty Marie, and she was found stabbed to death and burned in an oven in her grandmother’s home in Mississippi in 2018; the grandmother, 48-year-old Carolyn Jones, was charged with first-degree murder earlier this year. But Royalty was 20 months when she died, not 21, and unlike the baby in the TikTok video, she was Black, not white.

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Such inaccuracies are par for the course in the grotesque world of AI true-crime-victim TikTok, a subgenre of the massive true-crime fandom, which uses artificial intelligence to essentially resurrect murder victims, many of whom are young children. The videos, some of which have millions of views, involve a victim speaking in first person about the gruesome details of their deaths; most of them do not have a content warning beforehand.

“They’re quite strange and creepy,” says Paul Bleakley, assistant professor in criminal justice at the University of New Haven. “They seem designed to trigger strong emotional reactions, because it’s the surest-fire way to get clicks and likes. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but I think that might be the point.”