Meet ‘Amelia’: the AI-generated British schoolgirl who is a far-right social media star | Far right
In certain corners of the internet, on news feeds and niche algorithms, an AI-generated British schoolgirl has become something of a phenomenon.
Her name is Amelia, a purple-haired “goth girl” who proudly wears a mini union flag and seems to have a penchant for racism.
If you don’t know Amelia, chances are you’ll soon come across some viral meme or another inspired by her on Facebook or X, where her reputation is growing.
Amelia’s videos usually show her walking around London or the House of Commons, declaring her love for England and warning of the dangers of “Muslim activists” or “third world migrants”. In one clip, she is harangued by a bearded man in Islamic attire for eating a pork sausage.
The message is well-rehearsed on far-right social media, but it was Amelia’s AI invention that made it infinitely adaptable, creating a viral internet trend that anyone with access to a mainstream chatbot can participate in. X users have turned to its Grok AI tool to create so many Amelia memes that she’s now breaking out of niche silos online.
The origins of the character are ironic to say the least. An early iteration of Amelia emerged in a counter-extremism video game funded by the UK Home Office and created to deter young people aged 13 to 18 from being attracted to far-right extremism in Yorkshire.
Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism is a simple game in multiple choice format with basic animation. Its players are taken on a journey as characters from a middle school. They are asked to make decisions based on scenarios such as downloading potentially extremist content or joining an Amelia character at a rally organized by “a small political group” protesting changes in society and the “erosion of British values”.
Certain scenarios simulated in the game result in a referral to the UK government’s Prevent counter-terrorism programme.
However, it’s a subversion of Amelia’s character that exploded on social media in a way that surprised even the creators of the original game.
Among the plethora of increasingly sophisticated AI-generated iterations are a manga-style Amelia, a version of Wallace and Gromit, and “real-life” AI-generated encounters between her and the Father Ted or Harry Potter characters, complete with racist language and far-right messaging.
Analysis provided to the Guardian by Peryton Intelligence, a British company that monitors misinformation, indicated that an anonymous account known for cleverly spreading far-right messages launched the Amelia on X meme on January 9 with a message that has since been viewed 1.4 million times.
“Ameliaposting” volume has since increased from an average of 500 per day when this account first introduced it to the world to around 10,000, as of January 15, as it reached an international audience. As of Wednesday, it reached 11,137 posts on X alone.
In one of the most surreal twists, an Amelia cryptocurrency has emerged, with social media users looking to cash in on its value on the meme’s growing profile. On Wednesday, Elon Musk retweeted an X account promoting a cryptocurrency token Amelia.
“What we’re seeing is a monetization of hate,” said Matteo Bergamini, founder and CEO of Shout Out UK, a political and media education training company that created the original game.
“We saw Telegram groups messaging each other in Chinese about the meme coin and discussing how to artificially inflate its value, making a lot of money.”
The company itself has been the target of a deluge of hate mail, including threats which have now been reported to the police.
Bergamini emphasizes that the initial initiative was never intended as a standalone game. Rather, it was intended for use in classrooms alongside a suite of teaching resources, a fact he claims to have ignored in media coverage and commentary.
“There have unfortunately been a lot of misrepresentations,” he said. “The game doesn’t say, for example, that questioning mass migration is wrong in itself. »
Others suggested the initiative backfired, including making a “pretty goth girl” a negative character, inadvertently leading her to become a focus of admiration. But Bergamini said the game – which drew on feedback from focus groups with young people and was developed with a specific picture of the local threat in mind – continued to be used and that feedback from schools and others was positive.
Still, the speed and sophistication surrounding the creation of allegedly subversive Amelia memes online took him by surprise.
“This experience has shown us why this work is so important, but also causes us to think about our safety in conducting this work because of the very sophisticated coordination of those who profit from hate,” he said.
Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), said: “We have seen the meme spread and proliferate in remarkable ways within the far right and beyond, but what is also remarkable is how international it has now become.
“In some ways, this goes to the heart of what you might call the ‘dissident’ far right – individuals who position themselves outside of the mainstream political scene – whether it’s ‘shitposters’ who are just provoking, others who are into twee memes. An entire ecosystem has embraced it. Obviously, sexualized imagery is also key to this. The target audience is almost exclusively young men.”
The Home Office said Prevent had diverted almost 6,000 people from violent ideologies. He adds that projects such as the Pathways game were designed to target local risks of radicalization and were created and run independently of government.
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