Two miniature documentaries billed as “true crime” stories of murder in Colorado are entirely fake and apparently created by artificial intelligence, law enforcement said.
A 25-minute film about a Littleton man murdered by his stepson with whom he’d a sexual relationship reached 2 million views on YouTube, while another, about a Fort Collins man killing his wife, got 200,000. The videos used AI-generated photos of the supposed murderers and victims, invented the names of attorneys and got basic facts about the cities wrong.
Larimer County District Attorney Gordon McLaughlin told 9News that the Fort Collins video didn’t refer to a real case, and as far as he could tell, wasn’t even based on one. Fake true crime content could lead people to doubt real crime victims, or even video and photographic evidence presented in court, he said.
An expert on AI told The Denver Post that the most likely motive for the humans who’d used the technology to create the videos was profit from people watching the salacious content, and the ads that came with it.