Japan's Asahi Shimbun, the country's newspaper of record, confirms the existence of a bizarre paid anti-China propaganda scheme where AI-generated Westerners would narrate fictional bad experiences with Chinese people for Japanese viewers.
People were offered "from 1,500 to 5,000 yen per script, and 2,000 to 7,000 yen for editing" videos that bash China and present the Chinese as a "nuisance" and as "lacking in morals" through the mouths of fictional Westerners. The jobs required that applicants making the videos should be "people who love Japan and hate China."
The videos belonged to Japan's popular "kaigai no hannou" ("overseas reaction") genre, which is about showing foreigners (particularly white Europeans and Americans) praising Japanese things, around the nationalistic theme "foreigners are amazed by Japan's superiority."
In this instance the videos were assembled using AI imagery and synthetic voices reading scripted "testimonials" from fictional foreigners (such as an "American couple's personal experience") recounting bad experiences with Chinese people. The objective apparently being to lend more credibility in Japanese eyes to domestic anti-China xenophobia.
Pretty bizarre as a concept: the need for Western validation runs so deep that even domestic xenophobia requires fictional Westerners to say it...
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朝日新聞(asahi shimbun）
@asahi
「嫌中」動画の制作依頼を非公開に 仲介サイト「差別つながる」懸念 asahi.com/articles/ASTD5
「中国批判系」「嫌中系」をうたう動画の制作を依頼する募集が、仕事仲介大手「クラウドワークス」（東京）のウェブサイト上に掲載され、同社が3日、仕事依頼を非公開にする措置をとった。
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