Thailand in the eyes of AI
Dec. 31st, 2025 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spiderbraidsClosing out 2025 with the most bizarre story I've ever covered here (and this is someone who went at length on the rarity of surviving Scottish Gaelic dubs)
I am not a fan of AI slop, and to be fair, nor should most netizens with a bit of common internet decency :-) But one particular incident has really underlined how invasive that junk has become... (and yes, it is junk, don't @ me)
404Media reported on AI slop content about Elon Musk fixing America... The full article is behind a subscription wall, but the hero-excerpt for the article reads: "Some of the most popular content on Facebook leading up to the (2024) election was AI-generated Elon Musk inspiration p0rn made by people in other countries that went viral in the US." Any and all opinions on Elon aside, Elon praise isn't the only inspirational agenda being pushed with the help of AI slop :-\
This YouTube channel, whose title translates to "Thailand in the eyes of the world", presents Thai-narrated versions of videos about foreigners' experiences in Thailand, ranging from vlogs posted by foreign travelers about their experiences, to no less than Gordon Ramsey meeting up with a famous local chef (Thai-narrated version)... The Thai narrations sometimes feel a bit artificial sound-wise, but it's all-in-all a harmless exercise showing off our "soft power", and more importantly, the visual content is real and genuine (well, as real and genuine as you can expect from influencer vlogs anyway) However, I've foundtwo three similarly-titled channels that serve up very-likely-fabricated stories with the help of AI generated imagery and voice-over, all to push the narrative about how great and influential Thailand is, and all sorts of other adulations, bordering on propaganda in many cases :-\ My mom received a video in her online chat group that came from one of those other channels, about a supposed report by the US media on the quiet rise of Thailand fever in the states, sounds great right? We could always use news reports on Thailand soft power :-) (Even if it did seem a bit suspicious I'd never heard about any such rise before; outside of cuisine, the closest things to Thai influence in American culture I'd heard of were the protagonists of Amphibia and Molly McGee, and a Houston-based band named for the Thai word for airplane, who admit they probably would have picked an easier name to pronounce if they'd have expected to become that big :-\)
But instead of the video talking about this supposed report, it was a narrative about journalists for the New York Times investigating a supposed rise in the appreciation of Thai culture in the states, be it an increased number of Americans in Thai language schools, or a supposed viral clip of American teenagers speaking Thai naturally replete with Thai teen slang, told in a manner that reads more like fiction (or, cynically, propaganda) The biggest tell is that a later part of the narrative tells of a small machine part factory that supposedly put up large Thai-language signs on the wall and improved their productivity by 30% with less turnover, accompanied with a supposed picture of the factory... The (English) name of the factory appeared correctly, but the Thai-language signs were completely nonsensical, and not even remotely matching what was supposedly put up according to the narration, which given the premise of the video, I imagine IRL the signs would have been double-checked to make sure they said what they were supposed to say (yeah, I'm aware of the perils of getting cool-looking Chinese tattoos, but this is different) As of 2025, gen AI is starting to become literate in English, and even produce somewhat believable spoken Thai, but it's still terrible at generating Thai text (an example showing up those last two) The next scene of the narrative also talks of a Texas truck driver who put up stickers of Thai words in his truck window, whose accompanying AI-generated imagery also showed the same issues as the factory scene :-\ I'm not sure if my mother believed the story, but I definitely didn't :-\
I decided to check out other videos on the channel, and there are lots of videos based on the theme that even a simple chance encounter with Thailand can change the most prejudiced minds, many of them taking the form of westerners (usually students on their way to a different port of call in Asia for an overseas trip, but one features the King of Spain [!]) supposedly having to make an emergency landing in Thailand, and finding how great Thailand is, while another video tells of the BBC supposedly interrupting their normal programming with a live report on observing young elementary schoolboys entering a skytrain station during rain and grabbing their umbrellas from the rack in the station (as a Thai, I have never seen any umbrella racks at any of the stations I've been to, as most Thais just carry their umbrella with them), and also noting that children are allowed to walk alone, things that supposedly could never happen in the UK... (I should note that it could never happen here either, and I should also note that in most cases, instead of watching the videos, I grabbed the auto-generated transcript, and read them :-) Not only to not give the video a view, but also avoid having to listen to the monotonous AI-generated voice-over ;-)) Even the video about the supposed NYT article speaks of a senior editor thinking of Thailand as a land of tourism, street food, and agriculture, that lacks cultural influence :-\ While I do believe in Thailand's soft power, kind-hearted attitudes, and cultural influences, and I do believe that some foreigners really do fall in love with our country as a result of these, I doubt it's anywhere near to the degree of adulation that these videos give :-\ <self-promotion>(Just like I don't really believe that Thailand's women cricketers really would have made the 2022 ODI World Cup even if the qualifiers had played out)</self-promotion>
Another video brags about Thai doctors diagnosing a teenage girl more successfully than other countries' doctors could, while another talks about reactions to a supposed 9-minute NHK documentary about Thailand, supposedly viewed by 79% of the public, then causing websites for Thai language schools in Japan to crash due to high demand, and Thai restaurants in Japan to close early after running out of ingredients, which then goes on to reveal (in a first-person narrative apparently) that the person behind the documentary had originally intended to show Thailand in a negative light and deleted a whole day's worth of footage that contradicted his intent; whereas another video features an hour-long narrative about a Thai instant noodle company being wrongfully accused of putting beef in their noodles, resulting in them being banned from India and moving to Bangladesh, again supposedly first-person narrated by a food-safety officer supporting the decision to ban the company, and then having to make amends after finding out how popular the noodles were, how far people would go to get their fix after the ban, how much the company supported the local economy and education in India, how much they were doing for Bangladesh now, and more importantly, finding out that the beef-contaminated noodles that had led to the ban had actually been produced by a Chinese company in a sneaky bid to take over the market; in another on-brand move for this channel, the narrative also mentions that the officer's grandma died from eating this particular brand of noodles, so he'd spent the past several years giving Thai imported food extra-strict inspections and helped to support the ban, but in the light of the ban, he uncovered that there'd been seizures of Chinese-made counterfeit noodles around the time grandma died, and so it had been Chinese counterfeit that she ate (!) The title of the video seemingly tries to pass this story off as real by talking of media revealing big changes being suppressed by the Indian government, but the biggest tell: The supposed brand of noodles at the center of this story? Not an actual brand on our store shelves, which the top comment for the video called out :-\ (The channel's "about" page also says their content includes documentaries, i.e. factual items, about “Thailand in the eyes of the world”, so that definitely could throw off people)
(Minor sidenote: I looked up the market for instant noodles in India, and despite India being known for its curries, it turns out that there's a decent market for instant noodles, 3rd-largest in the world, and a brand originally from Thailand is actually one of the most popular brands in India :-))
Other stories feature nonsensical details: for example, a story about a UK-born woman causing a bit of a scandal in her daughter's school cafeteria with Thai-style rice wrapped with seaweed (uh...) claims (again, in first-person narration) that she fell in love with Thailand on her 16th birthday, because "as I was flipping through channels with the remote, my hand paused at a scene in a Thai drama" and she became enamored with the food that was being eaten in the show, which, why would you casually stumble across a Thai drama on UK TV? K-drama I might understand, and maybe this was been the basis for the piece, since Gimbap is essentially what the story describes (to be fair, the story does acknowledge that rice wrapped with seaweed is not actually Thai food, but the story compromises its credibility by saying that "it's a popular menu item in convenience stores and schools in Thailand that children are familiar with") Another mentions a Polish women's volleyball player becoming enamored with the people of Thailand, even as her team was losing all their matches in a tournament thanks to an injury to one of their best players, including to Thailand (Poland has a 12-4 record against Thailand, and 4-1 since the pandemic) and Kenya (the latter of which Poland has never lost to in real life as of 2025, and in fact has only ever lost one set total) Not to mention that in the story the player says at the start that there were 5 countries participating in the tournament: Thailand, Brazil, the United States, Italy, and Poland... The mention of Kenya comes out of nowhere, and the narrative has Poland losing five sets in a row before saying the game ended with Kenya winning 3-2 (O_o) and even saying the crowd applauded both teams "at the full time whistle" (o_O)
Also, two versions of the "emergency landing" story talk of Bangkok's airport being able to quickly arrange for Dutch and Czech interpreters to deal with the arriving students from those countries, while another involves African tribesmen having their JFK-Dubai-Kenya flight diverted to Bangkok, even though it's quite a ways away from the route... One video thumbnail talked of 210,000 Americans deciding to move to Thailand, yet the actual video title said 180,000, and there's a video that revolves around a linguist's amazement at not needing the subject of the sentence in Thai, and although they use terms like "High Context Culture", "non-subject centered" and "topic prominence" (real terms in linguistics), the video acts as if it's unique due to features of Thai culture, even though a few other more well-known languages have this feature :-\ And another weird detail I found in the noodle story is that it says the Thai company didn't put up a fight against the beef accusations to remain in India, instead deciding to peacefully withdraw from the market, and after the truth was uncovered, when asked months later why didn't they fight, their answer was "Sometimes retreating is a form of wisdom. Waiting for the heart to be understood is better than fighting to win." Weird wording aside, I don't think the moral higher ground is an excuse to withdraw a multimillion dollar business from the market under false pretenses, and cause more than a trillion rupees in economic damage :-\ (Yes, the story really says that's how much damage it supposedly caused due to damage to supply chains)
I actually stopped looking at the channel for a while, but when I looked at the channel again, one of the channel's newer videos might very well take the cake for ludicrousness: It's a variant of the "emergency landing" story revolving around a prestigious Boston private school's planned trip to Seoul being diverted to Bangkok due to the heaviest snowstorm in 50 years over Incheon Airport (given how much further Thailand is from Korea, surely Japan or China are better choices?), then being shacked up in a government school due to all hotels being full (with signs in the accompanying illustrations written in the usual AI gibberish), then being awed by the school lunches being served for their dinner that supposedly have nutritional details provided (uh...) then finding out that the storm isn't due to pass for 3 days and so they decide to just spend their trip in Bangkok (all on the basis of being impressed by the school's cleanliness and provided meal)... By story's end, the Boston school has opened Thai-language classes, and the first-person narrator has decided to aim to study at Thailand's best unis instead of Harvard (!)
Now, far be it from me to investigate who's creating this stuff and what they're hoping to achieve, but 404Media once made a whole in-depth investigation on Asian-based (thankfully not Thai-based) creators using AI to generate slop on Facebook; the full investigation is subscriber-walled, but the author tweeted some highlights of the article, and I suspect that something similar may be happening here, because the signs of AI generation would be quite obvious to someone in Thailand: not just the AI-gibberish imagery, but also the voice-over either mispronouncing words (one common error is pronouncing the word for ticket based on the orthography instead of the correct one) or spacing them wrongly (the Boston school story has an unnatural pause between "50" and "years" when describing the snowstorm, say), misspellings and awkwardly-broken words in the on-screen text narration, or using the wrong gender voice for first-person narration (such as a male voice-over for a story about someone named Claire, or the one with the women's volleyball player named Alexandra, or the Boston student named Jessica) And to be fair, some comments have called out the blatantly false stories and/or overt adoration :-) Under a similar concept, albeit a bit more grisly, 404Media also reported on a "true crime" Youtube channel with AI-generated crime stories, though that one has since been terminated... The teaser preview of the 404Media article, which includes a full video on one of the faked true crimes, has an initial reaction quite similar to my reaction to the NYT article video, while TubeFilter's article on the termination of the channel notes that "True Crime Case Files is likely far from the only fake content channel capitalizing on both the gen AI slop era and audiences’ continuing fascination with grisly crimes."
Speaking of which, while looking into this matter, I also stumbled on another slightly differently titled channel than the first one, featuring more content along the same lines, with some even being markedly similar to the other channel's stories... For example, the piece on the report on students with umbrellas is now about a report from China's CCTV, and there's an emergency landing story about a Chinese minister, while the volleyballer story is transposed to a Japanese player, which makes that story even more ludicrous: IRL, the Japan team is fairly deep with talent that losing even their best player shouldn't affect them enough to lose all their games, and that includes one against Malaysia... Like with the Poland story, that last opponent doesn't appear in the initally-mentioned 5 teams (here, Thailand, Brazil, USA, South Korea, and Japan), and the extra opponent just comes out of nowhere, but at least Japan wins one set in that match... out of 5 in a 3-2 loss; yes, the AI still couldn't count right, and on top of that the story couldn't even keep the timeline for playing that last match straight) I should also note that this second channel has the videos narrated by a female voice... even for those first-person narrated by male characters (!) Another video on this second channel couldn't keep its topic straight, as it talked of 3,500 Americans moving to Thailand, yet the story is about a Frenchman... Also, another talks of an American businessman being amazed by the work ethic culture in Thailand, and speaks of a short 10-second clip he made of a Thai airport worker taking good care of his luggage going viral with 12 million views, but the visual remains steadfastly stuck on a split-screen picture of surprised newscasters, and a still of a Veo-generated video of some random Western person at some random airport; you'd think that actually showing such a viral clip would be an integral part of the visuals for the story :-\ (Same goes with the videos about the supposed BBC report and NHK documentary) The channel hasn't had new videos uploaded to it for a while...
Later on, though, and also as a testament to how AI allows this nonsense to be easily prduced quickly, I managed to stumbled upon a third similarly-titled channel, this one featuring an emergency landing story involving French chefs having their JFK-Paris flight diverted to Bangkok due to a hurricane, which is even more ludicruous of a diversion than the African tribesmen story, and a video whose thumbnail mentions the Taoyuan Airport in Taipei rather than the presumably-intended Suvarnabhumi... More of note is that it also has two versions of the same general story about Western students (Canadian in one, German in the other) going to Thailand and being impressed by the country, both of which feature a stop at a highway rest-stop on the way from the airport to downtown (o_O) where the first-person narration is impressed with the well-equiped bathrooms including an electronic screen indicating vacant stalls (O_o) and a bragging claim that BTS trains are announced down to the second, not just minute, as overseas (or IRL) and have Wifi (nope, not true) The Canadian students version features a major prejudice angle: the trip has been planned by British Columbia's education minister as a campaign to showcase the superiority of Canadian education, and the first-person narration is by the daughter of the minister, whom mom has asked to collect evidence of Thailand's backwardness... There's a heated exchange over the phone with minister complaining to her daughter about her posting all the great non-backwards stuff from Thailand on social media, and there's a scene of the minister admitting to the BC Legislative Council that she gave her daughter a biased task and that it was political propaganda (how ironic) Other ludicrous details include the trip somehow making the international news, as if BBC and CNN could care about a Canadian teen exposing her country's infrastructural shortcomings compared to another country, and the teenager ending up having a Netflix documentary made about her, as well a public health center named for her, as well as making the 10 finalists for Time Person of the Year (!) And I suppose I should also add that this video is narrated with a male voice :-\
Some videos on the second channel haven't cracked triple digits in views (probably why it doesn't have new videos), whereas most on the 3rd are now in the thousands, and on the first channel, the video about the supposed NYT report received 44k views in about 1 week; and it should also be noted that none of these channels are very old, with the oldest video (from the first channel, about a French train engineer denigrating the ticket gates at Thai train stations as being for dogs, once again with Thai AI gibberish signage in the visuals) dating from November 10; that said, many of the videos on the actual "Thailand in the eyes of the world" channel (despite being almost a year old as of this writing) also have low view counts... It's concerning that in spite of clear signs of AI generation (which as noted above, suggest the videos may very well have been created by non-Thais), there's definitely an audience of people ready to swallow these stories hook, line and sinker, especially when inspirational stories are involved :-\ And in the clip I cited as an example of how gen AI can make believable spoken Thai but not legible written Thai text, one of the responses shown for the video, featuring an old lady telling off government workers for slow service, literally says "Thought it was AI, but it's real" even though the AI gibberish on a prominent sign in the footage (not to mention the slapdash attempt to hide the Sora watermarks) should have vindicated their AI suspicions immediately (thankfully, responses to that comment do put them straight) Meanwhile, with this similar clip, people responded to the AI-generated footage of an old lady telling off hospital workers for treating her badly, praising her for speaking what's on everyone's mind (conveniently, the signage in the hospital clip is too small or blurry to immediately read as the typical AI gibberish) Which seems to suggest that as long as a clip speaks to the people, they'll believe anything the clip says... Once again proving the old adage: "Don't believe everything you see on the internet" :-) In any case, I'm sure there's plenty of real stories about foreigners' positive impressions of Thailand out there to make videos about without having to resort to AI and blatant lies to puff us up :-) though how large the audience is who are willing to watch these genuinely true stories, that remains to be seen :-\
I am not a fan of AI slop, and to be fair, nor should most netizens with a bit of common internet decency :-) But one particular incident has really underlined how invasive that junk has become... (and yes, it is junk, don't @ me)
404Media reported on AI slop content about Elon Musk fixing America... The full article is behind a subscription wall, but the hero-excerpt for the article reads: "Some of the most popular content on Facebook leading up to the (2024) election was AI-generated Elon Musk inspiration p0rn made by people in other countries that went viral in the US." Any and all opinions on Elon aside, Elon praise isn't the only inspirational agenda being pushed with the help of AI slop :-\
This YouTube channel, whose title translates to "Thailand in the eyes of the world", presents Thai-narrated versions of videos about foreigners' experiences in Thailand, ranging from vlogs posted by foreign travelers about their experiences, to no less than Gordon Ramsey meeting up with a famous local chef (Thai-narrated version)... The Thai narrations sometimes feel a bit artificial sound-wise, but it's all-in-all a harmless exercise showing off our "soft power", and more importantly, the visual content is real and genuine (well, as real and genuine as you can expect from influencer vlogs anyway) However, I've found
But instead of the video talking about this supposed report, it was a narrative about journalists for the New York Times investigating a supposed rise in the appreciation of Thai culture in the states, be it an increased number of Americans in Thai language schools, or a supposed viral clip of American teenagers speaking Thai naturally replete with Thai teen slang, told in a manner that reads more like fiction (or, cynically, propaganda) The biggest tell is that a later part of the narrative tells of a small machine part factory that supposedly put up large Thai-language signs on the wall and improved their productivity by 30% with less turnover, accompanied with a supposed picture of the factory... The (English) name of the factory appeared correctly, but the Thai-language signs were completely nonsensical, and not even remotely matching what was supposedly put up according to the narration, which given the premise of the video, I imagine IRL the signs would have been double-checked to make sure they said what they were supposed to say (yeah, I'm aware of the perils of getting cool-looking Chinese tattoos, but this is different) As of 2025, gen AI is starting to become literate in English, and even produce somewhat believable spoken Thai, but it's still terrible at generating Thai text (an example showing up those last two) The next scene of the narrative also talks of a Texas truck driver who put up stickers of Thai words in his truck window, whose accompanying AI-generated imagery also showed the same issues as the factory scene :-\ I'm not sure if my mother believed the story, but I definitely didn't :-\
I decided to check out other videos on the channel, and there are lots of videos based on the theme that even a simple chance encounter with Thailand can change the most prejudiced minds, many of them taking the form of westerners (usually students on their way to a different port of call in Asia for an overseas trip, but one features the King of Spain [!]) supposedly having to make an emergency landing in Thailand, and finding how great Thailand is, while another video tells of the BBC supposedly interrupting their normal programming with a live report on observing young elementary schoolboys entering a skytrain station during rain and grabbing their umbrellas from the rack in the station (as a Thai, I have never seen any umbrella racks at any of the stations I've been to, as most Thais just carry their umbrella with them), and also noting that children are allowed to walk alone, things that supposedly could never happen in the UK... (I should note that it could never happen here either, and I should also note that in most cases, instead of watching the videos, I grabbed the auto-generated transcript, and read them :-) Not only to not give the video a view, but also avoid having to listen to the monotonous AI-generated voice-over ;-)) Even the video about the supposed NYT article speaks of a senior editor thinking of Thailand as a land of tourism, street food, and agriculture, that lacks cultural influence :-\ While I do believe in Thailand's soft power, kind-hearted attitudes, and cultural influences, and I do believe that some foreigners really do fall in love with our country as a result of these, I doubt it's anywhere near to the degree of adulation that these videos give :-\ <self-promotion>(Just like I don't really believe that Thailand's women cricketers really would have made the 2022 ODI World Cup even if the qualifiers had played out)</self-promotion>
Another video brags about Thai doctors diagnosing a teenage girl more successfully than other countries' doctors could, while another talks about reactions to a supposed 9-minute NHK documentary about Thailand, supposedly viewed by 79% of the public, then causing websites for Thai language schools in Japan to crash due to high demand, and Thai restaurants in Japan to close early after running out of ingredients, which then goes on to reveal (in a first-person narrative apparently) that the person behind the documentary had originally intended to show Thailand in a negative light and deleted a whole day's worth of footage that contradicted his intent; whereas another video features an hour-long narrative about a Thai instant noodle company being wrongfully accused of putting beef in their noodles, resulting in them being banned from India and moving to Bangladesh, again supposedly first-person narrated by a food-safety officer supporting the decision to ban the company, and then having to make amends after finding out how popular the noodles were, how far people would go to get their fix after the ban, how much the company supported the local economy and education in India, how much they were doing for Bangladesh now, and more importantly, finding out that the beef-contaminated noodles that had led to the ban had actually been produced by a Chinese company in a sneaky bid to take over the market; in another on-brand move for this channel, the narrative also mentions that the officer's grandma died from eating this particular brand of noodles, so he'd spent the past several years giving Thai imported food extra-strict inspections and helped to support the ban, but in the light of the ban, he uncovered that there'd been seizures of Chinese-made counterfeit noodles around the time grandma died, and so it had been Chinese counterfeit that she ate (!) The title of the video seemingly tries to pass this story off as real by talking of media revealing big changes being suppressed by the Indian government, but the biggest tell: The supposed brand of noodles at the center of this story? Not an actual brand on our store shelves, which the top comment for the video called out :-\ (The channel's "about" page also says their content includes documentaries, i.e. factual items, about “Thailand in the eyes of the world”, so that definitely could throw off people)
(Minor sidenote: I looked up the market for instant noodles in India, and despite India being known for its curries, it turns out that there's a decent market for instant noodles, 3rd-largest in the world, and a brand originally from Thailand is actually one of the most popular brands in India :-))
Other stories feature nonsensical details: for example, a story about a UK-born woman causing a bit of a scandal in her daughter's school cafeteria with Thai-style rice wrapped with seaweed (uh...) claims (again, in first-person narration) that she fell in love with Thailand on her 16th birthday, because "as I was flipping through channels with the remote, my hand paused at a scene in a Thai drama" and she became enamored with the food that was being eaten in the show, which, why would you casually stumble across a Thai drama on UK TV? K-drama I might understand, and maybe this was been the basis for the piece, since Gimbap is essentially what the story describes (to be fair, the story does acknowledge that rice wrapped with seaweed is not actually Thai food, but the story compromises its credibility by saying that "it's a popular menu item in convenience stores and schools in Thailand that children are familiar with") Another mentions a Polish women's volleyball player becoming enamored with the people of Thailand, even as her team was losing all their matches in a tournament thanks to an injury to one of their best players, including to Thailand (Poland has a 12-4 record against Thailand, and 4-1 since the pandemic) and Kenya (the latter of which Poland has never lost to in real life as of 2025, and in fact has only ever lost one set total) Not to mention that in the story the player says at the start that there were 5 countries participating in the tournament: Thailand, Brazil, the United States, Italy, and Poland... The mention of Kenya comes out of nowhere, and the narrative has Poland losing five sets in a row before saying the game ended with Kenya winning 3-2 (O_o) and even saying the crowd applauded both teams "at the full time whistle" (o_O)
Also, two versions of the "emergency landing" story talk of Bangkok's airport being able to quickly arrange for Dutch and Czech interpreters to deal with the arriving students from those countries, while another involves African tribesmen having their JFK-Dubai-Kenya flight diverted to Bangkok, even though it's quite a ways away from the route... One video thumbnail talked of 210,000 Americans deciding to move to Thailand, yet the actual video title said 180,000, and there's a video that revolves around a linguist's amazement at not needing the subject of the sentence in Thai, and although they use terms like "High Context Culture", "non-subject centered" and "topic prominence" (real terms in linguistics), the video acts as if it's unique due to features of Thai culture, even though a few other more well-known languages have this feature :-\ And another weird detail I found in the noodle story is that it says the Thai company didn't put up a fight against the beef accusations to remain in India, instead deciding to peacefully withdraw from the market, and after the truth was uncovered, when asked months later why didn't they fight, their answer was "Sometimes retreating is a form of wisdom. Waiting for the heart to be understood is better than fighting to win." Weird wording aside, I don't think the moral higher ground is an excuse to withdraw a multimillion dollar business from the market under false pretenses, and cause more than a trillion rupees in economic damage :-\ (Yes, the story really says that's how much damage it supposedly caused due to damage to supply chains)
I actually stopped looking at the channel for a while, but when I looked at the channel again, one of the channel's newer videos might very well take the cake for ludicrousness: It's a variant of the "emergency landing" story revolving around a prestigious Boston private school's planned trip to Seoul being diverted to Bangkok due to the heaviest snowstorm in 50 years over Incheon Airport (given how much further Thailand is from Korea, surely Japan or China are better choices?), then being shacked up in a government school due to all hotels being full (with signs in the accompanying illustrations written in the usual AI gibberish), then being awed by the school lunches being served for their dinner that supposedly have nutritional details provided (uh...) then finding out that the storm isn't due to pass for 3 days and so they decide to just spend their trip in Bangkok (all on the basis of being impressed by the school's cleanliness and provided meal)... By story's end, the Boston school has opened Thai-language classes, and the first-person narrator has decided to aim to study at Thailand's best unis instead of Harvard (!)
Now, far be it from me to investigate who's creating this stuff and what they're hoping to achieve, but 404Media once made a whole in-depth investigation on Asian-based (thankfully not Thai-based) creators using AI to generate slop on Facebook; the full investigation is subscriber-walled, but the author tweeted some highlights of the article, and I suspect that something similar may be happening here, because the signs of AI generation would be quite obvious to someone in Thailand: not just the AI-gibberish imagery, but also the voice-over either mispronouncing words (one common error is pronouncing the word for ticket based on the orthography instead of the correct one) or spacing them wrongly (the Boston school story has an unnatural pause between "50" and "years" when describing the snowstorm, say), misspellings and awkwardly-broken words in the on-screen text narration, or using the wrong gender voice for first-person narration (such as a male voice-over for a story about someone named Claire, or the one with the women's volleyball player named Alexandra, or the Boston student named Jessica) And to be fair, some comments have called out the blatantly false stories and/or overt adoration :-) Under a similar concept, albeit a bit more grisly, 404Media also reported on a "true crime" Youtube channel with AI-generated crime stories, though that one has since been terminated... The teaser preview of the 404Media article, which includes a full video on one of the faked true crimes, has an initial reaction quite similar to my reaction to the NYT article video, while TubeFilter's article on the termination of the channel notes that "True Crime Case Files is likely far from the only fake content channel capitalizing on both the gen AI slop era and audiences’ continuing fascination with grisly crimes."
Speaking of which, while looking into this matter, I also stumbled on another slightly differently titled channel than the first one, featuring more content along the same lines, with some even being markedly similar to the other channel's stories... For example, the piece on the report on students with umbrellas is now about a report from China's CCTV, and there's an emergency landing story about a Chinese minister, while the volleyballer story is transposed to a Japanese player, which makes that story even more ludicrous: IRL, the Japan team is fairly deep with talent that losing even their best player shouldn't affect them enough to lose all their games, and that includes one against Malaysia... Like with the Poland story, that last opponent doesn't appear in the initally-mentioned 5 teams (here, Thailand, Brazil, USA, South Korea, and Japan), and the extra opponent just comes out of nowhere, but at least Japan wins one set in that match... out of 5 in a 3-2 loss; yes, the AI still couldn't count right, and on top of that the story couldn't even keep the timeline for playing that last match straight) I should also note that this second channel has the videos narrated by a female voice... even for those first-person narrated by male characters (!) Another video on this second channel couldn't keep its topic straight, as it talked of 3,500 Americans moving to Thailand, yet the story is about a Frenchman... Also, another talks of an American businessman being amazed by the work ethic culture in Thailand, and speaks of a short 10-second clip he made of a Thai airport worker taking good care of his luggage going viral with 12 million views, but the visual remains steadfastly stuck on a split-screen picture of surprised newscasters, and a still of a Veo-generated video of some random Western person at some random airport; you'd think that actually showing such a viral clip would be an integral part of the visuals for the story :-\ (Same goes with the videos about the supposed BBC report and NHK documentary) The channel hasn't had new videos uploaded to it for a while...
Later on, though, and also as a testament to how AI allows this nonsense to be easily prduced quickly, I managed to stumbled upon a third similarly-titled channel, this one featuring an emergency landing story involving French chefs having their JFK-Paris flight diverted to Bangkok due to a hurricane, which is even more ludicruous of a diversion than the African tribesmen story, and a video whose thumbnail mentions the Taoyuan Airport in Taipei rather than the presumably-intended Suvarnabhumi... More of note is that it also has two versions of the same general story about Western students (Canadian in one, German in the other) going to Thailand and being impressed by the country, both of which feature a stop at a highway rest-stop on the way from the airport to downtown (o_O) where the first-person narration is impressed with the well-equiped bathrooms including an electronic screen indicating vacant stalls (O_o) and a bragging claim that BTS trains are announced down to the second, not just minute, as overseas (or IRL) and have Wifi (nope, not true) The Canadian students version features a major prejudice angle: the trip has been planned by British Columbia's education minister as a campaign to showcase the superiority of Canadian education, and the first-person narration is by the daughter of the minister, whom mom has asked to collect evidence of Thailand's backwardness... There's a heated exchange over the phone with minister complaining to her daughter about her posting all the great non-backwards stuff from Thailand on social media, and there's a scene of the minister admitting to the BC Legislative Council that she gave her daughter a biased task and that it was political propaganda (how ironic) Other ludicrous details include the trip somehow making the international news, as if BBC and CNN could care about a Canadian teen exposing her country's infrastructural shortcomings compared to another country, and the teenager ending up having a Netflix documentary made about her, as well a public health center named for her, as well as making the 10 finalists for Time Person of the Year (!) And I suppose I should also add that this video is narrated with a male voice :-\
Some videos on the second channel haven't cracked triple digits in views (probably why it doesn't have new videos), whereas most on the 3rd are now in the thousands, and on the first channel, the video about the supposed NYT report received 44k views in about 1 week; and it should also be noted that none of these channels are very old, with the oldest video (from the first channel, about a French train engineer denigrating the ticket gates at Thai train stations as being for dogs, once again with Thai AI gibberish signage in the visuals) dating from November 10; that said, many of the videos on the actual "Thailand in the eyes of the world" channel (despite being almost a year old as of this writing) also have low view counts... It's concerning that in spite of clear signs of AI generation (which as noted above, suggest the videos may very well have been created by non-Thais), there's definitely an audience of people ready to swallow these stories hook, line and sinker, especially when inspirational stories are involved :-\ And in the clip I cited as an example of how gen AI can make believable spoken Thai but not legible written Thai text, one of the responses shown for the video, featuring an old lady telling off government workers for slow service, literally says "Thought it was AI, but it's real" even though the AI gibberish on a prominent sign in the footage (not to mention the slapdash attempt to hide the Sora watermarks) should have vindicated their AI suspicions immediately (thankfully, responses to that comment do put them straight) Meanwhile, with this similar clip, people responded to the AI-generated footage of an old lady telling off hospital workers for treating her badly, praising her for speaking what's on everyone's mind (conveniently, the signage in the hospital clip is too small or blurry to immediately read as the typical AI gibberish) Which seems to suggest that as long as a clip speaks to the people, they'll believe anything the clip says... Once again proving the old adage: "Don't believe everything you see on the internet" :-) In any case, I'm sure there's plenty of real stories about foreigners' positive impressions of Thailand out there to make videos about without having to resort to AI and blatant lies to puff us up :-) though how large the audience is who are willing to watch these genuinely true stories, that remains to be seen :-\
