A video of a man with dark curls, ochre markings, and an unmistakably Aussie drawl walks viewers through red dirt country, talking excitedly about snakes, crocodiles and wedge-tailed eagles. But “Jarren” — the so-called Bush Legend — isn’t real.
He’s an AI-generated character created by South African content creator Keagan John Mason in New Zealand, and his growing popularity is raising serious ethical questions about “AI Blakface” and digital cultural appropriation.
A viral “wildlife educator” who doesn’t exist
Across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, Bush Legend has built a following of nearly 200,000 users with videos that appear to celebrate Australian wildlife and ecology with videos filled with “mate”s and “crikey”s. His clips are soundtracked with didgeridoo beats and feature him walking through the bush, apparently seeking out snakes or rare parrots.
But every pixel is fabricated. The videos are entirely AI-generated, including Jarren himself and the wildlife he “interacts” with.
Mason, who runs the accounts under Bush Legend: Wildlife Stories and Facts, claims the pages use “AI-generated visuals to share wildlife stories for education”. He has posted messages urging viewers to subscribe to support his content creation journey.
Experts warn of “AI Blakface” and fake representation
Dr Tamika Worrell, a Kamilaroi academic wrote in The Conversation that Bush Legend is part of a troubling global trend she describes as “AI Blakface”.
In her piece, she wrote that the trend “forms a new type of cultural appropriation” that allows non-Indigenous creators to “generate Indigenous personas through AI, grounded in stereotypical representations that amalgamate and appropriate cultures”.
In a comment to PEDESTRIAN.TV, Worrell added, “Ultimately, Bush Legend represents another space of cultural appropriation.
“The likeness of Indigenous people is stolen, and many in the audience are none-the-wiser that this isn’t a real person,” she continued.
On paper, platforms say they are trying to make AI content easier to spot. TikTok’s Community Guidelines now require creators to clearly label synthetic media, including videos that are “wholly generated or significantly edited by AI”, and the app can automatically tag or demote content that isn’t disclosed properly.
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, has also introduced an “AI info” system and broader labelling rules, using invisible watermarks and metadata to mark AI-generated images and video and prompting users to self‑disclose when they upload synthetic content.
But these systems depend heavily on creators doing the right thing and on users spotting small labels, which means many people scrolling casually through their feeds may still assume characters like Bush Legend are real.
A deeply concerning misuse of technology
“The ethical and cultural concerns of AI Blakface are not new — Indigenous peoples globally have been drawing attention to the many sinister ways that AI technologies are harnessed to provide a faux cultural front — ultimately working to distance themselves from Indigenous people,” Worrell tells P.TV.
Dr Terri Janke, a Wuthathi, Yadhaigana and Meriam lawyer and specialist in Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, told The Guardian that while the videos appear educational, they are “offensive and carry the risk of cultural flattening”.
“It’s theft that is very insidious in that it also involves a cultural harm,” Janke said. “Because of discrimination … the impacts of stereotypes and negative thinking, those impacts do hit harder.”
Corey Tutt OAM, a Kamilaroi man and founder of Deadly Science, told SBS NITV the replication of cultural identity through AI is deeply concerning especially when it comes to consent.
“More troubling still is the use of AI-generated images that resemble deceased people, where the technology searches for and recreates a likeness,” he told the publication.
The creator’s response
After mounting criticism, Mason’s AI avatar “Jarren” responded in a video, saying: “I’m not here to represent any culture or group and this channel is simply about animal stories. If this isn’t your thing — no worries — scroll and move on.”
Worrell told P.TV that Bush Legend’s attempt to address the backlash and encouraging people to ‘just scroll and move on’ is a “dismissal [that] does not engage with any accountability for the harm this [content] creates”.
Commenters under Mason’s video are equally unimpressed. “If its just animal stories — don’t use the likeness of Aboriginal people? Don’t use Yidaki/Didgeridoo music? It’s obvious the kind of cultural image your trying to push and it’s unethical because its not real,” Musician Kee’ahn wrote.
“This is so insulting to Indigenous People!! Use your own face in stead of appropriating other peoples and culture, Keagan!!!” another wrote.
A warning about what’s to come
Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at UNSW, told The Guardian that AI-generated media can easily absorb and reproduce racial or cultural bias. “They are going to carry the biases of that training data,” he said. “We’re going to stretch the boundaries of what is true and false.”
For Indigenous scholars, Bush Legend is not just a quirky tech story or an algorithmic party trick. It is a glimpse of a future where culture can be scraped, remixed and sold back to audiences without any relationship to the people it is taken from.
The question isn’t only how to spot what’s fake. It is whether platforms, policymakers and audiences are willing to draw a line when AI turns living cultures into content.
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