'It's not me, it's just my face': the models who found their likenesses had been used in AI propaganda

The well-groomed young man dressed in a crisp, blue shirt speaking with a soft American accent seems an unlikely supporter of the junta leader of the west African state of Burkina Faso. "We must support … President Ibrahim Traoré … Homeland or death we shall overcome!" he says in a video that began circulating in early 2023 on Telegram. It was just a few months after the dictator had come to power via a military coup. Other videos fronted by different people, with a similar professional-looking appearance and repeating the exact same script in front of the Burkina Faso flag, cropped up around the same time. On a verified account on X a few days later the same young man, in the same blue shirt, claimed to be Archie, the chief executive of a new cryptocurrency platform. They were generated with artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a startup based in east London.