The mother of Jamie Bulger, the boy who was murdered by two other children in the early 1990s, has expressed outrage over AI-generated videos on TikTok, which showed her son talking about his abduction.
Bulger, who was two at the time, was abducted by two ten-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, in 1993 in the United Kingdom. Bulger was beaten and tortured by the two older boys and left to die, in a crime that shook Britain and the world.
Venables and Thompson became the youngest people ever charged with murder in Britain.
The clip showing Bulger was part of a series featuring AI-versions of missing or murdered children. Madeleine McCann, the British girl who went missing in Portugal in 2007, was also featured.
Denise Fergus, Bulger’s mother, said she thought the clips were ‘disgusting’.
She said that while she did not have a problem with people talking about the incident, she drew a line at using AI to generate avatars of the dead or missing children.
‘To use the face and a moving mouth of a child who is no longer here, who has been brutally taken away from us, there are no words. It is not fair on the people who have lost children, or lost anyone. We are not just saying take James down, we are saying take it all down,’ Fergus was quoted as saying by the BBC.
The videos have subsequently been removed.