What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Fake Jasmine Crockett Videos

A few weeks ago, I posted a story about the proliferation of AI-created fake news videos about Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Because I am fair (and balanced!), this week I'm looking at the AI distortion of a hero from the left: Dallas-based congressperson Jasmine Crockett.

The real Crockett is sharp, confrontational, and isn't afraid to curse people out. AI-Jasmine Crockett is a folk hero who spends her life STUNNING, DESTROYING, and OBLITERATING various talk show hosts, actors, and political opponents. She took on Bill Maher, humiliated Seth Meyers, made Ellen DeGeneres regret insulting her, and still had time to have a judge arrested. On YouTube.

The real Jasmine Crockett is a political figure, but I don't think these fakes are propaganda exactly. They aren't political misinformation in the way we usually understand it. No one is trying to convince anyone to vote a certain way or write a letter to Congress. It's stranger than that. It's a flood of algorithm-driven cultural wish fulfillment in which computers make videos to satisfy some deeply rooted, tribal emotional need. I'd like to think most people recognize that these videos are fake (they're not faked very well) but there wouldn't be so many of them if they didn't work.

Jasmine Crockett STUNS Jimmy Kimmell—and Bill Maher, Seth Meyer, Ellen Degeneres, and everyone else

The video below describes an imaginary confrontation between talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and Jasmine Crockett.

For comparison, here's what really happened when Crockett was a guest on Kimmel's show:

As you can see, at no point was Kimmell STUNNED or HUMILIATED, and Crockett did not refer to the host as a "f*cking weasel" even once. ("F*cking weasel" is the go-to thumbnail insult on these videos, for some reason.)

The real video has been viewed 3.1 million times in 10 months. The fake has a view count of more than 600k in three weeks, but that's not a fair number, because there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of AI-created videos entitled "Jasmine Crockett Stuns Jimmy Kimmel on Live TV with a Savage Comeback—Audience Left in Shock!" on YouTube and other video sites. Some have 100k views, some have less than a thousand views, so there may be as many people watching the fake appearance as the real one.

If the idea was to influence American politics, to "own conservatives," or something, Jimmy Kimmel is a strange choice for Crockett's opposition. He's not a conservative. But the politics only function as bait to be clicked, and Jimmy and Jasmine are emotional buzzers, not people. Viewers have strong feelings about them, so a video with Crockett and Kimmel in conflict hits recommendation pay dirt.

Developing videos titles for this breed of AI slop is like political Mad Libs, but it's an easy-to-understand formula: The subject is a controversial media figure, the predicate is a verb that could describe both physical violence or rhetoric, and the object is a media figure. Close it off with a button and you got a YouTube AI political video.

The result are titles like these (that I made up):

• Matt Gaetz CRUSHES Rachel Maddow Live on MSNBC—She's Going Off the Air!

• AOC BALL-KICKS Tucker Carlson onto his fainting couch—That's gotta HURT!

• RFK Jr. MELANCHOLIES Brian Kilmeade With a Haunting Stare—Audience SHOCKED!

• Angela Davis FLAME THROWS Dick Cavett's Sitting Room Liberalism Into an Afro-Futurist Death Spiral: "YOU GOT DIALECTICALLY DESTROYED!"

(That last one probably wouldn't get many hits, but the thumbnail would look like this):

Credit: Stephen Johnson/Sora

The point is: AI slop-makers will have anyone fight anyone, regardless of political affiliation. Crockett has STUNNED Seth Meyer, Stephen Colbert, Tucker Carlson, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart. But so, roughly, has Caroline Leavitt. For some reason, so has Denzel Washington.

You might be wondering who would be DESTROYED if the queens of AI slop, Karoline Leavitt and Jasmine Crockett, were to face off, maybe to debate why they both have two Ts at the end of their name when so many names go without any Ts at all. The answer: Karoline Leavitt would ERUPT, but Jasmine Crockett would be STUNNED.

The videos themselves are secondary to their titles, and they're all terrible. They're uniformly slow-paced (longer videos lead to longer engagement time, a key YouTube metric) and the content is strangely tame, given the titles. Just a droning AI voice telling a boring story for half an hour over a single still frame of the video's subjects. It's only interesting when the AI screws up and gives someone extra fingers or mistakes Bill Maher for Chuck Schumer.

Regardless of the low quality, sometimes one of these AI-developed videos hits the the YouTube recommendation sweet spot and gets some traffic. There's no honor among thieves on social media, so many, many channels that produce this shit (Valorium Story, Gentry Stories, Battle Arena, etc., etc.) swarm like flies to rip off any mildly "sticky" title, and post roughly the same content, generally with diminishing returns in terms of views. It's ridiculously easy and inexpensive to set up an automated content farm. Whether you'd make back the $100 a month or so in software subscriptions you'd need to create these videos is an open question, but I guess people have to hope.

What are viewers getting out of these videos?

Although these videos almost always have a quick disclaimer screen explaining that they're fake or "parody," judging by the comments, people are taking them seriously. "This young lady's education as a lawyer was not in vain!!! She's amazing!!!" one reads. "Those who voted for Ms. Crockett did so with unwavering confidence in her, and she delivers making us proud that she will challenge injustice without pause!" reads another.

But are the comments fake, too? Is this just AI commenting on videos made by AI, the Dead Internet Theory coming true in real time? Man, I don't even know. It's easier to make fake comments on YouTube than it is to fake a whole video, but I still assume that, at the end of the conveyor belt, there are actual viewers slumped over their phones, thinking (or doing whatever passes for "thinking" these days) about Jasmine Crockett. Something is shaping this narrative, and it feels depressingly human.

You can't blame computers for videos like "Jasmine Crockett LOSES IT As Elon Musk Confronts Her to Her FACE!" That's on us, baby. We want to watch endless videos of our perceived tribal enemies being HUMILIATED, DESTROYED, STUNNED, and FORCE-CHOKED, maybe because we like carnage, or maybe because we want to feel like we belong to something, that somewhere, Justice is jumping off the top rope, ready to SUPLEX, STUN, and OBLITERATE the people who annoy us. And if we can't find enough of the real thing to get that little jolt of spite-flavored dopamine, we'll make computers fake it for us.