From the grisly “resurrection” of murdered children on TikTok to stealthy AI-generated images smuggled into Netflix documentaries, true crime and AI have becoming increasingly entwined.
Now, a YouTuber has revealed that he passed off completely fake stories with AI-generated visuals as the real thing on his “true crime” channel.
The creator of the now-defunct “True Crime Case Files” YouTube channel admitted to 404 Media that he intentionally dialed up the prurient interest on monetized videos with titles like “Coach Gives Cheerleader HIV after Secret Affair, Leading to Pregnancy.”
According to Paul, the pseudonym given to the creator by 404 to protect his identity, the videos’ scripts were half generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and half written by him, and the visuals came from an AI image generator whose name he didn’t disclose.
In what he says was an attempt to tip off viewers to the phony nature of the entire gambit, the creator would include strange details into his often-hypersexual storylines and name characters outlandishly.
Still, many of the millions of viewers who watched True Crime Case Files videos seemed to believe they were real. In the comments section of one video about a stepfather who had a “secret gay love affair” with his stepson before killing him, for instance, a viewer said they were “confident that sexual relationship between the stepfather and the stepson started way before he was 19.”
“I’m trying to overdose the viewer on luridness, to try to confront them with the fact that they seem to be so invested in the luridness of it all,” the YouTuber said. “People’s secret lives, their secret affairs that are really taboo.”
Initially, the self-styled filmmaker included an AI disclaimer on his first foray into generative video content a few years back. Those early videos, which were rom-com parodies with titles like “Princess meets Fisherman,” got little more than 100 views per post. Paul acknowledges that the AI he was using at the time was limited compared to the software available to him now — but he thinks the disclosure contributed too.
“I think part of it is people are just hostile towards AI,” he told 404. “So when they see the word AI, they’re just freaked out by it.”
Switching gears, he began to make formulaic true crime-style videos with AI without disclosing that he’d used the technology. The results, as Paul put it, were a sort of “gold rush.”
“I really felt like I needed to stake my claim,” he said, “before anybody else thought of it.”
Paul acknowledged that he’d been making money from his videos and working on the channel full-time before it was taken down in January, seemingly as a result of 404‘s queries to YouTube about the lack of AI disclaimer labeling.
When speaking to 404 about the “lurid” content, as he put it, that he was making, Paul was defensive about the “absurdist art form” he believes he pioneered.
“If people don’t understand it, that says a lot about human nature and their own natures and the nature of crime,” he told the website, “and perhaps they’re not willing to question themselves.”
Though True Crime Case Files is no more, there are still undisclosed AI slop copycats live on YouTube, some of which are monetized. Paul’s formula, however dubious, is clearly working.
More on AI slop: Jonah Peretti, Who Filled BuzzFeed With AI Slop, Now Says AI Is Threatening Human Agency
