AAS-IN-ASIA, Kathmandu, June 2025
I will present part of my reserach on deepfakes at the forthcoming AAS-in-ASIA entitled “Affordable Deepfake Russian Wives Amongst Chinese Digital Influencers.” The research for this paper was prepared in collaboration with Minyan Huang.
Abstract
Deepfake technology allows Chinese digital influencers to create videos that embody “wifehood fantasies” as they reproduce, enhance, and reshape AI generated imagery. Since 2018, face-swapping Apps and technologies have become highly accessible tools and widely utilized within digital cultures. (De Seta, 2021; Wang & Zhao, 2024). At the same time, the Chinese government has pushed ahead with strict regulations on deepfake Apps as they are often used to create pornography and misinformation. (Hine & Floridi, 2022). Within a global media context, “deepfakery” has turned into sex/gender-focused creativity used to make benign and exploitative synthetic bodies and identities. This paper will focus on deepfake Russian wives and how they are appropriated and commented on amongst Chinese influencers. Influencers create and impersonate affordable and affectionate fiancées as a way to lure Chinese customers who have become frustrated with marriage requirements and Chinese “gold-digging” women. Deepfakes will be examined by means of online ethnography across the video platforms Douyin (抖音) and Kuaishou (快手 ) and related to social contexts such as masculine marriage frustrations and The Foreign Chicks Movements (FCM, 洋妞运动) that have informed different demographics of the AI information society. These varied deepfake cultures will be interpreted as they collide with civil discourses that encompass the public’s engagement with relationship anxieties and marriage dreams in China’s post-pandemic era.
BOOK CONTRACT: DEEPFAKE BODIES
I have signed a book contract with Bloomsbury Academic Press to write a new book Deepfake Bodies: The Sexual Politics of AI. As part of research into the present and future body politics of Artificial Intelligence, I will start several collaborations
+ In Hong Kong, I continue my affiliation with the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Cultural Studies Division to carry out research about Chinese-specific models of AI and deepfake technology and how they are shaped by netizen creativity, techno-feminism and Internet governance. I am very lucky to be assisted by part-time Research Assistant Raegan who works ar CUHK.
+ I have started new collaboration with PhD researcher and computational analyst and sociologist Vasileois Maltezos of the Unversity of Helsinki to do a big data study of deepfake content on social media. Vasilis helped us with a previous study of how Pepe the Frog imagery circulated on the LIHKG forum during Hong Kong’s social movements, which led to an article in Journal of Digital Social Research.