In Jemima’s first year of high school in New Zealand, her social life was flourishing. She had just started going out with a boy in her class, joined the hockey team, was training to be in the New Zealand Cadet Force, and had started competitive swimming. After dates, school, and swim practice, she chose to spend her free time indulging in her favorite online activity: watching gore videos.
Jemima’s fascination with gore started when she was 11, when she stumbled across an A.I.-edited video of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting on TikTok. “There were Minions in the place of people,” she told me. “The gun was a Minion, the people were Minions, but you could still see the mosque.” Jemima, who is 15 now and whose name has been changed to protect her identity, lived close to Christchurch and remembered the devastation of the shooting, but watching this edit—a subgenre of A.I. slop known as “Minion gore”—she felt differently about the tragedy. This time, she found it funny.
Watching these A.I. edits became a pastime for her friend group; they’d share the videos at school and at sleepovers. One day, after watching a video on TikTok recommending the website called “Watch People Die,” they typed it into their search engine and browsed: murders, suicides, self-immolation, crushing, and disembowelments. The website went beyond people dying; it was an endless archive of human suffering. “It’s some of the most disgusting and violent videos I’ve ever seen,” Jemima said.
