The educational game, intended to teach UK schoolkids to recognize radical views, has provided the basis for a viral AI character on social media.
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Amelia, a character designed to teach teens about extremism, has been repurposed as a far-right meme spreading anti-immigration and nationalist messages.
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Posts featuring Amelia exploded from 500 to 10,000 daily between January 9th-15th, with one post receiving over 1.4 million views.
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The character gained global audiences and even inspired an Amelia-themed cryptocurrency.
AI-generated characters may no longer seem like a surprise. And while many of our eyes are already trained to spot something that was actually created with the help of artificial intelligence, its “products” still manage to impact people.
At least that’s what happened with Amelia, an AI-generated character created to steer youngsters away from extremism.
Instead, Amelia, a purple-haired goth-styled schoolgirl avatar, has become a “far-right social media star,” indicates The Guardian.
Videos and images featuring different versions of Amelia have been circulating online. Some of them show her walking around London with a Union Jack flag, talking about her love for England, and sharing anti-immigration messages.
In one of the AI-generated videos, Amelia highlights what England is known for: its food, literature, and traditions.
Then the avatar starts to make remarks about the LGBTQ community and immigrants taking over. In the video, Amelia says, “Sadiq Khan, the mayor? This is London, mate, not Afghanistan. Or Star Wars.”
Amelia is now considered a symbol of far-right ideologies. However, the original idea behind Amelia was quite different.
Where does Amelia come from?
The purple-haired student is one of the characters in the educational game Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism. The game was funded by the UK Home Office to teach young people aged 13 to 18 to recognize and avoid extremism.
Users are invited to play as one of the characters, who then go through different scenarios and must choose the right course of action when asked to download extremist content, join an extremist group, or attend a protest.
In these scenarios, users can see Amelia as the one who is inciting the extremist views, blaming immigrants, going against societal changes, and threatening the extinction of British values.
Amelia goes viral
The character soon became viral online, with various alterations emerging on social media. What’s concerning is that the character often shares racist remarks and far-right messaging.
According to an analysis by Peryton Intelligence (via The Guardian), a disinformation monitoring company, the Amelia character was first used as a meme to spread a right-wing agenda on January 9th on the X social media platform. Since then, the post has been seen more than 1.4 million times.
It’s been reported that since then, the Amelia-related posts grew from around 500 a day to 10,000 as of January 15th, when the character reached international audiences.
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The character has also inspired an Amelia cryptocurrency.
The CEO of Shout Out UK, the company behind the game, Matteo Bergamini, said the idea was to use it as an educational tool. However, this didn’t secure the company from receiving a lot of hate and threats.
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