Didn't anyone at the Home Office ever read Mary Shelley or H G Wells?
The origins of the character are ironic, to say they least. An early iteration of Amelia began life in a counter-extremism video game funded by the UK Home Office and created to deter young people aged 13-18 from being attracted to far right extremism in Yorkshire.
Why would they be? What's been happening in Yorkshire, I wonder?
Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism is a simple multiple choice format game with basic animation. Its players are taken on a journey as characters at a college. They are invited to make decisions in scenarios including whether or download potentially extremist content or join an Amelia character on a rally organised by “a small political group” protesting against changes in society and the “erosion in British values”.
You released a virtuesignalling hectoring game, one that you really should have known would be subverted by gamers post-Gamergate...
Certain choices result in a referral under the British government’s Prevent counter-terrorism programme.
And of course, that's exactly what happened!
However, it is a subversion of the Amelia character that has exploded across social media channels in a way that has astonished even the creators of the original game. Among the plethora of increasingly sophisticated AI-generated iterations are a Manga-style Amelia, a Wallace and Gromit version and AI-generated “real life” encounters between her and the characters of Father Ted or Harry Potter, accompanied by racist language and far-right messaging.
We live in ....interesting times, don't we?
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