As travel vloggers go, South African Kurt Caz has never exactly trafficked in highbrow content.
His career as an influencer began about six years ago, through YouTube videos with simple but effective titles like “What is Bologna, Italy Like?”
But as Caz got more travel time under his belt, his videos quickly devolved into the exploitative fare typical of most poverty vloggers: “Don’t Visit This Egyptian Ghetto!” and “Avoiding Guerillas on Peru’s Deadliest Road” became the new blueprint, while his views ballooned into the millions.
Now after building a following of some four million subscribers, Caz is flipping the script from thinly veiled travel exploitation to overt racism — with a little help from generative AI.
In a 36-minute YouTube video titled “Avoid This Place in London,” Caz braves the London borough of Croydon, where 36.2 percent of residents are immigrants. Of course, he only does so with his trusted goon Leo in tow, who’s notably much smaller than Caz himself.
As shock vlogs go, it’s pretty unremarkable. The influencer spouts off some obnoxious missives about crime and immigration, referring to non-white people running errands as “interesting characters.” What is remarkable is the video’s thumbnail, which shows Caz walking down a street flanked by storefronts with signage in Arabic script. A man passing by on a bike is also shown clad in a black balaclava, mean mugging Caz as he films.
Yet as the social media account Right Wing Cope observed, the same frame in the video bears little resemblance to the one in the preview. As it turns out, both the store signs are in English, and the menacing biker was actually a smiling Black guy — a sure sign of an image doctored with generative AI.
Even if the AI edits were real, they hardly represent a neighborhood in ruin. Of course, for anyone versed in the UK’s unique brand of racism, these are obvious dogwhistles, playing on an audience eager to confirm that their country is being taken over by insidious migrant hoards.
Caz himself constantly stokes these fires, even as his own footage directly contradicts his fear-mongering. “The emergency services are out and about,” Caz says as a firetruck passes by, seemingly on its way to a fire, as opposed to a criminal incident. “I feel a certain energy in the air, like something’s brewing.”
In the video, the biker from the thumbnail even stops to give Caz a fistbump, after recognizing him from YouTube. “You see, there are friendly people here too, amongst the hostiles,” the vlogger tells the camera as the biker pops a sick wheelie. “Just surrounded by hostiles. Goodness, gracious me.”
As one elderly white woman elegantly told Caz and his henchman while the camera was rolling, the YouTuber is “talking absolute nonsense.” “Alright then have a good day, have a great day, in Soviet Britain,” Caz stammers.
Back in September, Futurism reported on the rise of pro-white, anti-immigrant AI slop in the UK. As generative AI has become more accessible, these images have gained prominence as a tool for right-wing propagandists to stir up anti-immigrant vitriol throughout the country.
Caz’ thumbnail is a prime example of this — a piece of media altered with AI to spread the gospel of reactionary bigotry, slipping into millions of social media feeds without a second thought.
Caz didn’t responded to a request for comment.
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