As storm clouds gather over an urban landscape resembling New York City, the words “AMERICAN DREAM” hang in a darkening sky as the video ends.
The message is clear: Despite its promises of a better life for all, the United States is in terminal decline.
The video, titled American Dream or American Mirage, is one of a number of segments aired by Chinese state broadcaster CGTN – and shared far and wide on social media – as part of its A Fractured America animated series.
Other videos in the series contain similar titles that invoke images of a dystopian society, such as American workers in tumult: A result of unbalanced politics and economy, and Unmasking the real threat: America’s military-industrial complex.
Besides their strident anti-American message, the videos all share the same AI-generated hyper-stylised aesthetic and uncanny computer-generated audio.
CGTN and the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC did not respond to requests for comment.
The reason that they’ve done it in this way is, you could hire an animator, and a voiceover artist to do this, but it would probably end up being more time-consuming. It would probably end up being more expensive to do,” Ajder told Al Jazeera.
“This is a cheaper way to scale content creation. When you can put together all these various modules, you can generate images, you can animate those images, you can generate just video from scratch. You can generate pretty compelling, pretty human-sounding text-to-speech. So, you have a whole content creation pipeline, automated or at least highly synthetically generated.”
China has long exploited the enormous reach and borderless nature of the internet to conduct influence campaigns overseas.
