Denise Fergus called the clips depicting her murdered son ‘sick’ (Picture: PA/TikTok)
The mum of James Bulger has hit out at ‘disgusting’ AI-generated videos appearing to show her son describing his own murder.
The two-year-old was tortured and killed by schoolboys Jon Thompson and Robert Venables, then aged 10, after they snatched him from a shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside, in February 1993.
It was a crime which horrified the nation, and James’s mum Denise Fergus says the clips circulating on TikTok exploiting his killing have forced her to relive that horror all over again.
She told the Mirror: ‘It is bringing a dead child back to life. It is beyond sick.’
In the video, an AI-generated toddler says: ‘Hello, my name is James Bulger.’
He goes on to narrate details from the abduction and murder, with some of the shots set near railway tracks – which was where James’s body was found.
It is one in a series of similarly ghoulish clips featuring avatars of other missing or murdered children, including Madeleine McCann and Baby P, the Mirror reports.
It has now been 30 years since Denise Fergus’s son was murdered (Picture: Ken McKay/ITV/Rex/Shutterstock)
The toddler was lured away from a shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside, in February 1993 (Picture: PA)
The TikTok clip features an AI-generated version of him talking about the crime (Picture: TikTok)
Denise told the paper the most upsetting thing was watching one clip which bore a striking resemblance to a photo of her son, with his lips moving.
She said: ‘It is one thing to tell the story, I have not got a problem with that. Everyone knows the story of James anyway.
‘But to actually put a dead child’s face, speaking about what happened to him, is absolutely disgusting.’
She said ‘there are no words’ for people who ‘use the face and a moving mouth of a child’ who has been ‘brutally taken away’, describing them as ‘disturbed’, and urged they be removed.
‘It is not fair on the people who have lost children, or lost anyone,’ she added.
Denise’s husband said he managed to track down one of the producers behind the clips and pleaded for them to be taken down.
But he received a reply saying: ‘We do not intend to offend anyone. We only do these videos to make sure incidents will never happen again to anyone.
‘Please continue to support and share my page to spread awareness.’
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TikTok said it had removed several videos flagged with them and taken action against the accounts, adding: ‘We want TikTok to be a welcoming place for everyone, and there is no place on our platform for disturbing content of this nature.
‘Our Community Guidelines are clear that we do not allow synthetic media that contains the likeness of a young person. We continue to remove content of this nature as we find it.’
Thompson and Venables were handed life sentences but released on license with new identities aged 18 in 2001.
The former has never reoffended, but Venables was sent back to prison in 2010 and 2017 for possessing indecent images of children. He is currently serving a 40-month sentence.
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‘It is bringing a dead child back to life. It is beyond sick.’
