A wildly popular social media wildlife educator, hailed by followers as an 'Aboriginal Steve Irwin', has been revealed to be a complete digital fabrication, sparking serious ethical accusations of 'AI blackface' and cultural appropriation.
The 'Bush Legend': A Convincing Digital Fiction
Known online as the Bush Legend, the character named Jarren boasts over 180,000 combined followers across Meta's Facebook and Instagram platforms. In videos set to pulsating didgeridoo music, he is shown exploring the Australian outback, handling snakes, and tracking elusive wildlife, his commentary peppered with familiar Aussie colloquialisms like 'mate' and 'crikey'.
His convincing presentation led fans to marvel at his daring and even call for him to have his own television show. However, the wildlife expert and the scenarios are entirely generated by artificial intelligence. Meta's data indicates the account, created in October 2025, is operated from New Zealand.
Experts Decry 'Cultural Flattening' and Harm
The deliberate creation of an avatar appearing to be an Indigenous person has raised profound ethical questions. Dr Terri Janke, a leading expert in Indigenous cultural and intellectual property, acknowledged the videos' remarkable realism but labelled the act offensive.
"I feel a bit misled by it all," Janke stated, warning of "cultural flattening" and pointing out the insidious nature of the theft. "It's theft that is very insidious in that it also involves a cultural harm... Because of the discrimination … the impacts of stereotypes and negative thinking, those impacts do hit harder."
She emphasised that ethical use of AI for First Nations content requires the direct consent and involvement of Indigenous communities, which is absent in this case.
'AI Blackface' and Amplifying Racism
Tamika Worrell, a Kamilaroi scholar and senior lecturer in critical Indigenous studies at Macquarie University, was more direct, calling the avatar a form of "digital blackface" and cultural appropriation.
"It's AI blackface – people can just generate artworks, generate people, [but] they are not actually engaging with Indigenous people," Worrell said. She highlighted the dual harm: such accounts often share only 'palatable' aspects of Indigenous knowledge, and the comment sections on the Bush Legend posts amplify the same racist rhetoric often directed at real Indigenous people online.
AI expert Professor Toby Walsh from UNSW noted that AI systems inherently carry the biases of their training data, risking the perpetuation of stereotypes. He also warned that the digital 'tells' of AI are vanishing, making it "next to impossible" for the public to discern real from fake content.
When faced with criticism, the Bush Legend account responded through its AI avatar, claiming it does not seek to represent any culture and is "simply about animal stories." It told critics to "scroll on" if they disliked the content, despite earlier prompts asking followers for a monthly subscription fee.
Guardian Australia attempted to contact the page's creator, identified as a South African national living in New Zealand, but received no response. Meta has also been contacted for comment on the ethically fraught account operating on its platforms.
