The fake videos are mere shards in the widening mosaic of digital blackface, a pattern that’s spiked in the past two years as generative AI video tools have become widely accessible. “There’s been a massive acceleration,” says Safiya Umoja Noble, a UCLA gender studies professor and author of Algorithms of Oppression, which focuses on digital biases against Black women in particular. “The digital blackface videos are really pulling from the same racist and sexist stereotypes and tropes that have been used for centuries.” The net effect is a patina of Blackness stripped of cultural obligation or stewardship – minstrelsy in a nutshell.