From 404 Media
‘Minion Gore’ Videos Use AI to Post Murder to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube
By Emanuel Maiberg
People are using the popular AI video generator Runway to make real videos of murder look like they came from one of the animated Minions movies and upload them to social media platforms where they gain thousands of views before the platforms can detect and remove them. This AI editing method appears to make it harder for major platforms to moderate against infamously graphic videos which previously could only be found on the darkest corners of the internet.
The practice, which people have come to call “Minion Gore” or “Minion AI videos” started gaining popularity in mid-December, and while 404 Media has seen social media platforms remove many of these videos, at the time of writing we’ve seen examples of extremely violent Minion Gore videos hosted on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X, which were undetected until we contacted these platforms for comment...
“In most cases, current hashing/fingerprinting are unable to reliably detect these variants,” Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on digitally manipulated images and a developer of PhotoDNA, one of the most commonly used image identification and content filtering technologies, told me in an email. “Starting with the original violative content, it would be possible for the platforms to create these minion variations, hash/fingerprint them and add those signatures to the database. The efficacy of this approach would depend on the robustness of the hash algorithm and the ability to closely mimic the content being produced by others. And, of course, this would be a bit of a whack-a-mole problem as creators will replace minions with other cartoon characters...”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley and a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project.
