One AI-generated human race, part III
The further AI-generated adventures of a TikTok spam network
In two articles in late 2025, I analyzed a network of TikTok spam accounts posting extremely similar AI-generated videos of nonexistent Black people, interspersed with occasional commercial spam. Although the majority of the accounts in this network ceased posting around the end of the year, many have subsequently resumed (and a few never stopped). As of March 28th, 2026, roughly half of the accounts in this network have been recently active, and their content has evolved further.
40 of the 76 known accounts in the network have posted at some point in 2026, and all of them have pivoted in some fashion from their initial content lineup. Unlike the videos from fall 2025, which featured the same three hashtags in the description of every video, most of the new posts from the network contain no hashtags whatsoever, and generally lack text captions as well. The recent posts are all very similar and fall into one of two broad categories: dating-themed AI-generated videos, and advertising in multiple languages. Thus far, no account has posted content from both categories.
In recent weeks, many of the accounts in this spam network have posted three different variations on repetitive AI-generated videos asking male viewers whether they would date a woman of a given race. The three types of videos include, with varied wording:
video of a woman seated in a car, asking “would you date a Black woman?”
video of a group of women outdoors, asking “would you kiss a Black woman outside?”
video of a woman standing in front of a neutral background, asking “I’ve heard men in the U.S. don’t like Brazilian women, but what about you?”
As can be seen in the montage above, the quality of the video and audio is inconsistent from post to post, with some videos showing obvious signs of their artificial origin and others being far more realistic. The AI-generated videos set in vehicles are, in general, more obviously inauthentic than the other two variants.
The remaining accounts in the spam network have largely changed focus to various forms of advertising. Most of the advertising posts are of one of two types: photorealistic English-language videos showcasing clothing, accompanied by background music, and cartoonish Spanish-language videos advertising various dietary supplements. Both types of video bear signs of being synthetically generated, and some include watermarks from popular AI video generation tools. Unlike the dating-themed videos, some of the advertising videos include hashtags.
Although many of the accounts have deleted all of their older content, a handful have not, making the sudden change in focus obvious when scrolling through their post histories. In most cases, there is a gap of weeks or months between the older videos and the current material. In several cases, the account operator also appears to have forgotten to update the avatar after changing an account’s focus, as a handful of the accounts have avatars that do not look like the AI-generated people in the videos currently posted by the account, but do resemble previous rounds of spam.
The fact that a significant portion of the network has at this point pivoted to commercial spam strongly suggests that this spam is the primary goal of the network. That being said, there are still unanswered questions; while it is possible the AI-generated videos about dating are simply a method to grow the accounts’ audience, the discoverability of these videos is somewhat undermined by the lack of hashtags and textual descriptions, and it is possible the operators of the network have other goals as well. Time, and further observation, may well reveal more.
