Thailand in the eyes of AI: A follow-up
Mar. 22nd, 2026 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spiderbraidsAnother post on AI-generated inspo-slop about Thailand, that somehow manages to mention The Owl House and the Beatles (the post that is, not the slop :-) though there is Beatles slop in there too :-\)
My last post of 2025 revolved around AI-generated utopian feel-good inspo-slop about Thailand, and here's an update on that front:
Good news: Two of the channels that I mentioned in the original post have been shut down, and another channel I found since then had its videos removed
Not-so-good news: The terminated channels were shut down due to multiple third-party reports of copyright infringement; given that the visuals were generated by AI, and the scripts were probably also written by AI, I find myself wondering what could possibly have been reported on :-\
Worse news: I wrote that "AI allows this nonsense to be easily produced quickly", and sure enough, a quick YouTube search on the term "emergency landing" (in Thai) then limiting the results to the last month (count me as another person who wants "sort by date" back) there are more channels, and at least two channels have names that are an affront to anyone who might fear that some people might take the stories as true: "Real Life Tales" and "Stories from Real Life" (while the channel that had its videos removed was called "Truth the World Needs to Know") Other channels are named like "Inspirational Tone", "International Reactions", "World Sees Us", "Discover Thailand"... and "Legends of Thai Monks" (Turns out this last channel's slop mainly revolves around monks, but some of the typical stuff was posted here too) Some of these channels are actually older than the ones I covered in the original post, though one channel had previously put up stories that seemed to mostly involve pregnant women and/or rich people before switching to the current utopian inspo stuff
The typical stuff is still there (such as the "much-viewed short documentary" stuff, and also the "emergency landing" stuff, one of which even manages to get the British royalty involved) Some stories seem like they've been copied straight over from (or perhaps by?) the now-terminated channels, albeit (at least sometimes) with different scripts and different visuals: I found a clone of the Boston student story, a duplicate of the story of a Canadian minister's daughter trying to make Canada look good, as well as a copy of the last story I noticed on one of the terminated channels, revolving around a Thai take on pasta making an Italian kid finally eat pasta after hating it all his life (yes, the story acknowledges how improbable and limiting it is for a kid in Italy to hate pasta; and there's a whole section about his mother seeing the use of bottled ketchup for the sauce as an abomination, but the Thais not only insisting that it makes the recipe, but it's specifically the sweeter Thai ketchup that does so) However, another new genre of story is about Thailand being the only country accepting a plane's emergency landing request, which gives me an opportunity to segue into one thing I didn't mention in the original post, namely that I found some stories that, besides making Thailand look great, also went out of their way to make other countries' people look bad:
- One story from one of the terminated channels begins with its French protagonist having her bag stolen at Bastille Square, and the only person actually doing anything to help is a Thai person, with others either ignoring her cries for help or filming with cell phone
- Another one revolves around Thailand being very accommodating of a UK wheelchair-ridden tourist, whereas in Korea her chair tripped on the curb and everyone just laughed at her and/or took photos, and the hotel she reserved had no record of her request for a handicapped-friendly room
Another story about a Thailand-developed strain of potatoes (as well as a whole system to help them grow effectively and protect the crop from storms) helping to diversify agriculture in the Dominican Republic reads very much as if it could be true, until the part about the Dominican-grown potatoes suddenly competing against the iconic Idaho spuds in the Western market and the DR becoming the 2nd biggest potato exporter in the Western hemisphere (!) Meanwhile, the pasta story isn't the only instance of a Thai adaptation of a foreign cuisine showing up the foreigners, as I found an instance of a Thai student baker helping save a small-town French bakery by selling their bread with pork floss, and later bread with pandan custard :-\ Another cuisine-driven story involves a Japanese Michelin-starred sushi chef proudly declaring on NHK that Tom Yum Koong was too crude to be called fine cuisine (surely respectable Japanese chefs would be more open to overseas foods), and it would be enough for the story to have said chef come to Bangkok, taste the iconic sour shrimp soup at a fine restaurant and fall in love with it, but this story gives him an "Anton Ego in Ratatouille" moment by having him reveal that his mother was actually Thai, and loved to make the soup for him, much to dad's disapproval (that ultimately playing a role in why he renounced all things Thai, his roots included, after mom died), as well as revealing that he and the Thai chef who made him the soup shared the same grandmother (!) ultimately leading to him closing his sushi restaurant to run a Thai restaurant with the Thai chef (!!)
I also previously reported on a story about a British woman who'd moved to Thailand and back causing a scandal at a school canteen by making rice wrapped in seaweed for her daughter to eat instead of the same old fish and chips, and one of the new channels has transposed this story to Thai-style omelet on rice, which causes some story beats to no longer make sense; for example, omelet on rice is nowhere near as exotic-looking as the seaweed rice of the original, yet the daughter's classmates are said to have asked what that fluffy golden sheet was, and another scene has the teacher saying that the classmates that normally don't touch their veggies enjoyed eating omelet on rice (which, well, why wouldn't they if it's made with just fish sauce and eggs? and in both cases, the story has the mother receiving a call from the head of the PTA calling her no less than a traitor for introducing foreign cuisine to the canteen, and then having to fight a proposal to formally ban foreign cuisine from the school, which sounds a bit extreme, but xenophobia does seem to also be a recurring theme in these inspo-slop stories)
And since this is AI, there are also instances of the voice-over mispronouncing words (and apparently, the pasta story from the terminated channel suddenly abruptly repeated "the superman" for several seconds mid-story based on the auto-generated transcript, similar to as mentioned in this story; the currently surviving version does not have this glitch) and stories not matching their titles: Another story in the "emergency landing" genre talks of 15 Greenland students who end up wanting to study in Thailand, but the story begins with a mention of a physics teacher from a small research school on Ko Samui, so the mention of a student saying "We don't know the language here" makes no sense whatsoever :-\ There was also a story titled "Inuits rejected 100 trillion yen! Why they picked Thailand"... but the actual story had no mentions of Inuits, nor rejected Japanese offers of money, and the references to ice-cold weather felt out of place in a story about a Karen (not that kind LOL, this kind) girl having to help an American leader of a rare earth survey mission in north Thailand rescue colleagues during a storm-stranded expedition (it's cold in the north, but it never freezes that significantly), ultimately turning into a story about trusting locals' (read: Thai people's) knowledge over millions in fancy equipment:
- One segment is about the opening day of the "Thai-American Arctic Research Centre", while another section says that the protagonist "could still hear the -52 Celsius wind as if it had followed him back"
- There's a mention near the end of its protagonist taking a look at "the ice sheet that swallowed 3 of his colleagues"... This was Thailand, so it was actually a trail that turned into mud in a storm swallowing one of the mission's cars; there's even a scene of the protag going to a small temple in Bangkok to say a prayer for the deceased (!)
(ETA: Another channel has a similar story of a Karen elder helping a stranded Thai documentary producer, but the title incongruously translates to "British man cries in the middle of a supermarket in Bangkok after drinking sachet instant coffee; chaos ensues" [none of those words are relevant to the video; the Karen elder prepares ginger tea rather than coffee for the guy] I also found a story about a Thai student singing in Thai at a choral contest at a California high school, whose title mentions "Thai music played on a New York train" instead, with the thumbnail even showing a person listening to music on a train... and I even found channels that, rather than put title text over an AI generated thumbnail, used AI to generate the title text graphic as well, causing the text to be nonsensical gibberish [!])
(ETA2: I also found a story outside the Thailand utopia inspo genre that also featured weird AI mispronunciation of location names, referring to the Ram Intra-At Narong Expressway as the Ram Insa-Ah-chanrong Expressway... Also, the reference was made in reference to the main character planning her route from the airport to the Thailand Cultural Centre; that expressway passes nowhere near the best route from, I assume, Don Muang Airport to the centre [the MC is flying in from Had Yai, and there are more flights from HDY to DMK than BKK])
The story about New York Times news investigation that started sent me down the rabbit hole was also present on one of the new channels (with what looks like the same script, but the sole visual now being a faked New York Times frontpage with a partially garbled headline, and no "The" in the masthead), but another similar story talks of a Western teen craze of studying the Thai language and the "Mai Pen Rai" (roughly "It's okay") philosophy, without the promotion of big stars (no mention of Blackpink's Lisa?), nor a big-budget government campaign, nor a trend from blockbuster movies, which also features mentions of clips of American teens talking in Thai with various skill-levels... Meanwhile in the real world, half-Thai animator Matt "Amphibia" Braly couldn't even get his own Thai-themed animated project made at a major studio, and when Dana "The Owl House" Terrace mentioned she'd had a peek at the project before its cancellation, someone responded with "You gotta make your projects more wide appealing if you're gonna want the big budget", adding "if you're a business obviously you have to take into account that [T]hailand mythology is not a hugely popular thing and animated films aren't cheap"... prompting Dana to block them for being close-minded LOL. (I can understand both sides of the argument: I have no illusions that Thai mythology has any real wide appeal that major studios would take a punt on it [more people have heard about Greek mythology, yet apparently this is the same studio that has also shelved a film about Medusa twice, even though Lauren "MLP G4" Faust was going to helm it the first time], but the other response to the "Thai mythology isn't popular" Tweet said "Whether or not mythology is widely known isn’t relevant at all ... In fact I’d argue more obscure or lesser known legends have far more potential" while another user responded to a different Tweet in the discussion with "you’re saying, Thai culture isn’t popular so we shouldn’t get movies about it? Well did you ever think about the reason it isn’t popular is because there’s no movies like this one trying to give it recognition?")
To finish with a side note: I actually overheard my dad listening to a story about the Beatles visiting a sick kid at a Liverpool hospital, and although the Beatles did visit a sick kid at hospital at least once, that incident happened in Melbourne, they were also visiting Ringo, and certainly did not involve the kid writing a song for them to sing... A little lookaround later, turns out that inspo-slop has come for the Beatles, as there are at least two whole channels of supposed "untold stories" about the band... One of those stories features the Beatles playing classical music, live on air, on a dare issued by a DJ on BBC Radio 2... in 1965, even though Radio 2 didn't exist until 1967; to say nothing about the presenter's programme being said to offer listeners "their afternoon dose of classical music education and cultural commentary", which sounds more the remit of Radio 3, or the Third Programme at the time, nor the fact that the piece pronounces "live on air" as to rhyme with "give" rather than "five", nor the thumbnail showing the band playing guitars and singing into a microphone (their drumset is visible too), even though they're, y'know, supposedly playing classical music, which is famously instrumental, and Paul is described as playing the piano (it's clearly an AI fakery meant to represent the events of the story, since there's a sign in the BG saying "BBC Radio 2" and the name of the presenter, with an old bloke holding a mic and making a shocked face superimposed in the corner)... Once again, proving you should never trust anything on the internet :-\
(ETA: Found a video from NBT talking about one Thailand inspo-slop video, in which NBT checked with Thailand's airport authority to confirm that no Spanish royals have ever had an emergency landing in Thailand)
My last post of 2025 revolved around AI-generated utopian feel-good inspo-slop about Thailand, and here's an update on that front:
Good news: Two of the channels that I mentioned in the original post have been shut down, and another channel I found since then had its videos removed
Not-so-good news: The terminated channels were shut down due to multiple third-party reports of copyright infringement; given that the visuals were generated by AI, and the scripts were probably also written by AI, I find myself wondering what could possibly have been reported on :-\
Worse news: I wrote that "AI allows this nonsense to be easily produced quickly", and sure enough, a quick YouTube search on the term "emergency landing" (in Thai) then limiting the results to the last month (count me as another person who wants "sort by date" back) there are more channels, and at least two channels have names that are an affront to anyone who might fear that some people might take the stories as true: "Real Life Tales" and "Stories from Real Life" (while the channel that had its videos removed was called "Truth the World Needs to Know") Other channels are named like "Inspirational Tone", "International Reactions", "World Sees Us", "Discover Thailand"... and "Legends of Thai Monks" (Turns out this last channel's slop mainly revolves around monks, but some of the typical stuff was posted here too) Some of these channels are actually older than the ones I covered in the original post, though one channel had previously put up stories that seemed to mostly involve pregnant women and/or rich people before switching to the current utopian inspo stuff
The typical stuff is still there (such as the "much-viewed short documentary" stuff, and also the "emergency landing" stuff, one of which even manages to get the British royalty involved) Some stories seem like they've been copied straight over from (or perhaps by?) the now-terminated channels, albeit (at least sometimes) with different scripts and different visuals: I found a clone of the Boston student story, a duplicate of the story of a Canadian minister's daughter trying to make Canada look good, as well as a copy of the last story I noticed on one of the terminated channels, revolving around a Thai take on pasta making an Italian kid finally eat pasta after hating it all his life (yes, the story acknowledges how improbable and limiting it is for a kid in Italy to hate pasta; and there's a whole section about his mother seeing the use of bottled ketchup for the sauce as an abomination, but the Thais not only insisting that it makes the recipe, but it's specifically the sweeter Thai ketchup that does so) However, another new genre of story is about Thailand being the only country accepting a plane's emergency landing request, which gives me an opportunity to segue into one thing I didn't mention in the original post, namely that I found some stories that, besides making Thailand look great, also went out of their way to make other countries' people look bad:
- One story from one of the terminated channels begins with its French protagonist having her bag stolen at Bastille Square, and the only person actually doing anything to help is a Thai person, with others either ignoring her cries for help or filming with cell phone
- Another one revolves around Thailand being very accommodating of a UK wheelchair-ridden tourist, whereas in Korea her chair tripped on the curb and everyone just laughed at her and/or took photos, and the hotel she reserved had no record of her request for a handicapped-friendly room
Another story about a Thailand-developed strain of potatoes (as well as a whole system to help them grow effectively and protect the crop from storms) helping to diversify agriculture in the Dominican Republic reads very much as if it could be true, until the part about the Dominican-grown potatoes suddenly competing against the iconic Idaho spuds in the Western market and the DR becoming the 2nd biggest potato exporter in the Western hemisphere (!) Meanwhile, the pasta story isn't the only instance of a Thai adaptation of a foreign cuisine showing up the foreigners, as I found an instance of a Thai student baker helping save a small-town French bakery by selling their bread with pork floss, and later bread with pandan custard :-\ Another cuisine-driven story involves a Japanese Michelin-starred sushi chef proudly declaring on NHK that Tom Yum Koong was too crude to be called fine cuisine (surely respectable Japanese chefs would be more open to overseas foods), and it would be enough for the story to have said chef come to Bangkok, taste the iconic sour shrimp soup at a fine restaurant and fall in love with it, but this story gives him an "Anton Ego in Ratatouille" moment by having him reveal that his mother was actually Thai, and loved to make the soup for him, much to dad's disapproval (that ultimately playing a role in why he renounced all things Thai, his roots included, after mom died), as well as revealing that he and the Thai chef who made him the soup shared the same grandmother (!) ultimately leading to him closing his sushi restaurant to run a Thai restaurant with the Thai chef (!!)
I also previously reported on a story about a British woman who'd moved to Thailand and back causing a scandal at a school canteen by making rice wrapped in seaweed for her daughter to eat instead of the same old fish and chips, and one of the new channels has transposed this story to Thai-style omelet on rice, which causes some story beats to no longer make sense; for example, omelet on rice is nowhere near as exotic-looking as the seaweed rice of the original, yet the daughter's classmates are said to have asked what that fluffy golden sheet was, and another scene has the teacher saying that the classmates that normally don't touch their veggies enjoyed eating omelet on rice (which, well, why wouldn't they if it's made with just fish sauce and eggs? and in both cases, the story has the mother receiving a call from the head of the PTA calling her no less than a traitor for introducing foreign cuisine to the canteen, and then having to fight a proposal to formally ban foreign cuisine from the school, which sounds a bit extreme, but xenophobia does seem to also be a recurring theme in these inspo-slop stories)
And since this is AI, there are also instances of the voice-over mispronouncing words (and apparently, the pasta story from the terminated channel suddenly abruptly repeated "the superman" for several seconds mid-story based on the auto-generated transcript, similar to as mentioned in this story; the currently surviving version does not have this glitch) and stories not matching their titles: Another story in the "emergency landing" genre talks of 15 Greenland students who end up wanting to study in Thailand, but the story begins with a mention of a physics teacher from a small research school on Ko Samui, so the mention of a student saying "We don't know the language here" makes no sense whatsoever :-\ There was also a story titled "Inuits rejected 100 trillion yen! Why they picked Thailand"... but the actual story had no mentions of Inuits, nor rejected Japanese offers of money, and the references to ice-cold weather felt out of place in a story about a Karen (not that kind LOL, this kind) girl having to help an American leader of a rare earth survey mission in north Thailand rescue colleagues during a storm-stranded expedition (it's cold in the north, but it never freezes that significantly), ultimately turning into a story about trusting locals' (read: Thai people's) knowledge over millions in fancy equipment:
- One segment is about the opening day of the "Thai-American Arctic Research Centre", while another section says that the protagonist "could still hear the -52 Celsius wind as if it had followed him back"
- There's a mention near the end of its protagonist taking a look at "the ice sheet that swallowed 3 of his colleagues"... This was Thailand, so it was actually a trail that turned into mud in a storm swallowing one of the mission's cars; there's even a scene of the protag going to a small temple in Bangkok to say a prayer for the deceased (!)
(ETA: Another channel has a similar story of a Karen elder helping a stranded Thai documentary producer, but the title incongruously translates to "British man cries in the middle of a supermarket in Bangkok after drinking sachet instant coffee; chaos ensues" [none of those words are relevant to the video; the Karen elder prepares ginger tea rather than coffee for the guy] I also found a story about a Thai student singing in Thai at a choral contest at a California high school, whose title mentions "Thai music played on a New York train" instead, with the thumbnail even showing a person listening to music on a train... and I even found channels that, rather than put title text over an AI generated thumbnail, used AI to generate the title text graphic as well, causing the text to be nonsensical gibberish [!])
(ETA2: I also found a story outside the Thailand utopia inspo genre that also featured weird AI mispronunciation of location names, referring to the Ram Intra-At Narong Expressway as the Ram Insa-Ah-chanrong Expressway... Also, the reference was made in reference to the main character planning her route from the airport to the Thailand Cultural Centre; that expressway passes nowhere near the best route from, I assume, Don Muang Airport to the centre [the MC is flying in from Had Yai, and there are more flights from HDY to DMK than BKK])
The story about New York Times news investigation that started sent me down the rabbit hole was also present on one of the new channels (with what looks like the same script, but the sole visual now being a faked New York Times frontpage with a partially garbled headline, and no "The" in the masthead), but another similar story talks of a Western teen craze of studying the Thai language and the "Mai Pen Rai" (roughly "It's okay") philosophy, without the promotion of big stars (no mention of Blackpink's Lisa?), nor a big-budget government campaign, nor a trend from blockbuster movies, which also features mentions of clips of American teens talking in Thai with various skill-levels... Meanwhile in the real world, half-Thai animator Matt "Amphibia" Braly couldn't even get his own Thai-themed animated project made at a major studio, and when Dana "The Owl House" Terrace mentioned she'd had a peek at the project before its cancellation, someone responded with "You gotta make your projects more wide appealing if you're gonna want the big budget", adding "if you're a business obviously you have to take into account that [T]hailand mythology is not a hugely popular thing and animated films aren't cheap"... prompting Dana to block them for being close-minded LOL. (I can understand both sides of the argument: I have no illusions that Thai mythology has any real wide appeal that major studios would take a punt on it [more people have heard about Greek mythology, yet apparently this is the same studio that has also shelved a film about Medusa twice, even though Lauren "MLP G4" Faust was going to helm it the first time], but the other response to the "Thai mythology isn't popular" Tweet said "Whether or not mythology is widely known isn’t relevant at all ... In fact I’d argue more obscure or lesser known legends have far more potential" while another user responded to a different Tweet in the discussion with "you’re saying, Thai culture isn’t popular so we shouldn’t get movies about it? Well did you ever think about the reason it isn’t popular is because there’s no movies like this one trying to give it recognition?")
To finish with a side note: I actually overheard my dad listening to a story about the Beatles visiting a sick kid at a Liverpool hospital, and although the Beatles did visit a sick kid at hospital at least once, that incident happened in Melbourne, they were also visiting Ringo, and certainly did not involve the kid writing a song for them to sing... A little lookaround later, turns out that inspo-slop has come for the Beatles, as there are at least two whole channels of supposed "untold stories" about the band... One of those stories features the Beatles playing classical music, live on air, on a dare issued by a DJ on BBC Radio 2... in 1965, even though Radio 2 didn't exist until 1967; to say nothing about the presenter's programme being said to offer listeners "their afternoon dose of classical music education and cultural commentary", which sounds more the remit of Radio 3, or the Third Programme at the time, nor the fact that the piece pronounces "live on air" as to rhyme with "give" rather than "five", nor the thumbnail showing the band playing guitars and singing into a microphone (their drumset is visible too), even though they're, y'know, supposedly playing classical music, which is famously instrumental, and Paul is described as playing the piano (it's clearly an AI fakery meant to represent the events of the story, since there's a sign in the BG saying "BBC Radio 2" and the name of the presenter, with an old bloke holding a mic and making a shocked face superimposed in the corner)... Once again, proving you should never trust anything on the internet :-\
(ETA: Found a video from NBT talking about one Thailand inspo-slop video, in which NBT checked with Thailand's airport authority to confirm that no Spanish royals have ever had an emergency landing in Thailand)
