Digital Shadows: Royal Children Face AI-Driven Disinformation Campaign

Conspiracy theories are nothing new in the royal world—especially when it comes to Prince William and Princess Kate—but one particularly strange rumor swirled around the internet recently, and it involved a secret 16-year-old princess.

Royal journalist Lydia Alty shared a series of AI-generated pictures on Instagram this summer in an effort to point out the dangerous ways people can get fooled by fake photos. In one image, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis stand next to a girl who looks almost identical to a teenage Brooke Shields. “Arielly 16 years, George 13 years, Charlotte 11 years, Louis 8 years,” the graphic reads.

Obviously, there’s no Princess Arielly, as Alty and numerous commenters pointed out ("Who the frig is Arielly????" read one reply). But as AI expert Amil Khan told the Times last week, the Royal Family has been the target of some highly coordinated fake news attacks in the past year—and they seem to be getting worse.

“This is something we’ve been looking at for a while,” Khan, who serves as chief executive of AI company Valent, told the publication. The expert works with companies to uncover AI-generated manipulation and said he’s been monitoring “15 coordinated influence networks in the U.K.” that have been targeting the Royal Family.

The posts grew more frequent “just before The King’s state visit to America earlier this year,” Khan said, noting that “there was a growing campaign attacking him" that includes "Maga-style accounts"

Adding to the narrative are numerous posts that The King, who is the supreme governor of the Church of England, had “betrayed Britain and Christianity” and would be converting to Islam. Some of the messages were tracked to bot farms in southeast Asia, but Khan said attacks have also come from Russia, China and "the far right."

Not every post is sensational, which makes it more complicated for people who might not be savvy enough to recognize a fake image. Take the photos of Prince William and Princess Kate posing with their kids on a supposed vacation, or a doctored image of William congratulating Kate after completing the National Three Peaks Challenge.

At the end of the day, Ciaran Martin, a former head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, told the Times that the public needs to use “critical thinking” when looking at royal news online.

“Efforts are under way to try to make it easier to spot fake information,” Martin said. “But as and until they work at scale, we’re going to have to rely on people using their critical thinking and skepticism when it comes to online information.”