Ghoul Kids Club There is, apparently, a TikTok subgenre of the already-problematic true crime fandom that’s using artificial intelligence to digitally resurrect the victims of heinous crimes and have them tell the stories of how these real-life children were killed. As Rolling Stone reports, most of these accounts change the appearance — and sometimes the names — of the actual victims when using AI to digitally resurrect them, likely as a means to get around TikTok’s recent rule banning “deepfake” depictions of young people and requiring all use of the tech be labeled as such. Still, the AI-generated characters purport to tell the story of terrible crimes that happened to actual children, although they often tweak key details — an indistinguishable morass of fact and fiction, in other words, that leaves us wondering what, exactly, the purpose of these videos really is. “They’re quite strange and creepy,” Paul Bleakley, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, told Rolling Stone. “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.” Literally Why While some of these accounts do provide disclaimers saying that they don’t use real images out of respect for the dead, the effect when watching them is nonetheless the same: very uncanny, very unsettling, and that they were presumably made without the consent of the victims’ families. “Imagine being the parent or relative of one of these kids…True Crime Ghouls Are Using AI to Resurrect Murdered Children