The mother of murdered toddler James Bulger has criticised AI-generated videos of her dead son circulating on TikTok.
The two-year-old was kidnapped from New Strand Shopping Centre in 1993 and tortured and killed by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.
Denise Fergus said the videos, which depict an AI image of James explaining the events of his notorious murder, were forcing her to relive the events of his brutal murder.
She told The Mirror: “It is bringing a dead child back to life. It is beyond sick.”
One video included a photograph of a railway line where his body was found two days after his abduction.
Mrs Fergus said: “It is one thing to tell the story, I have not got a problem with that. Everyone knows the story of James anyway.
“But to actually put a dead child’s face, speaking about what happened to him, is absolutely disgusting.”
Her husband Stuart Fergus said he’d asked the person responsible for the clips to take them down, but the producer of the video replied saying their intention was not to offend, but to “make sure incidents will never happen again to anyone”.
TikTok has since removed several videos after they were reported and is said to have taken measures against the accounts responsible for posting them.
The video app added in a statement: “We want TikTok to be a welcoming place for everyone, and there is no place on our platform for disturbing content of this nature.
“Our Community Guidelines are clear that we do not allow synthetic media that contains the likeness of a young person.
“We continue to remove content of this nature as we find it.”
James Bulger was abducted, tortured and murdered when he was two years old in 1993— (PA)
The AI technology used to create the videos has caused copyright and privacy concerns given that it works by using public data.
Just last month, Queen’s University in Belfast warned that the lack of data protection laws in the UK could lead to ”ghostbots”, a term which describes when AI is used to create digital reincarnations of the dead.
In March, the UK decided against creating a new body dedicated to regulating artificial intelligence, while the EU has drafted the world’s first-ever law to regulate the industry.
The UK instead chose to split the responsibility between the bodies that oversee human rights, health and safety, and competition.
The Competition and Markets Authority said it would seek to understand how models that use large amounts of unlabelled data were developing.
