With black curly hair and brown eyes, Jaren stands in the dense forest of the Australian Outback, with red soil at his feet, and a snake writhing in front of him.
In a series of online videos, the social media star, known online as Bush Legend, walks through dense forests or drives on deserted roads in search of wedge-tailed eagles. Many of the videos are set to pulsating percussion instruments and yidakis (didgeridoos).
His voice sounds like a cross between Costa Georgiadis and Steve Irwin of Gardening Australia. His speech is full of “mate” and “crikey” as he enthusiastically shares snippets about Australian wildlife with his thousands of followers – from venomous snakes and crocodiles to redback spiders and the elusive night parrot, once thought to be extinct.
His followers leave admiring comments, wondering how he can get so close to animals and even suggesting he needs his own TV show.
But none of it is real. Wild life and the person representing them are all creations of AI.
Created in October 2025, the meta indicates the account is based in New Zealand, the Instagram account originally shared an AI-generated satirical news account called ‘Neck Minute News’ before moving towards wildlife content. Earlier incarnations of the bush legend depicted the character wearing white body paint that appeared to mimic ochre, with a bead necklace around his neck.
As of this week, the Bush Legend account has 90,000 followers on Instagram and 96,000 followers on Facebook. He says his focus is on creating awareness and education about Australian wildlife.
Guardian Australia has contacted the person believed to have created the account, a South African living in New Zealand. He did not respond to many approaches.
‘Cultural leveling’
The choice to create an avatar featuring an indigenous person has raised ethical concerns.
Lawyer and Indigenous cultural and intellectual property expert Dr. Terry Janke says the images and content are “remarkable” in their realism.
“You think it’s real, I was just scrolling through and I thought, ‘How have I never heard of this guy?’ He’s deadly, he should have his own show,” she says. “Is that Black Steve Irwin? In green or khaki, he’s a bit like Steve Irwin and David Attenborough meet.
But while Wuthathi, Yadhigana and Maryam Mahila say the engaging videos are “pretty incredible when you look at it as a tool for education”, the creation of a seemingly indigenous avatar is offensive and risks “cultural leveling”.
“Whose personal image did they use to create this persona? Did they bring people together?” she asks. “I feel a little disoriented by all this.”
AI-generated content poses a particular risk to marginalized communities and may be considered theft of cultural and intellectual property. This takes away opportunities from potentially authentic accounts, such as videos created by the vast network of tribal rangers.
“This theft is devastating because it also involves cultural loss,” says Janke. “Because of discrimination…the effects of stereotyping and negative thinking, those effects are more intense.”
Janke says it is possible to ethically use AI technology to create content about First Nations people, but it requires the consent and participation of First Nations people.
Tamika Worrell, senior lecturer in critical Indigenous studies at Macquarie University, says AI avatars are a form of cultural appropriation and “digital blackface” where a non-black person creates a black or Indigenous caricature online.
Kamilaroi Woman says that the proliferation of AI tools without proper legislative protection means that images, cultural knowledge and stories can be disseminated without proper consent.
“AI has become a new platform that we have no control over or any role in,” she says.
“Not just the stories or the language but our actual visuals can often be taken from people who have died – or simply mixing together a series of different people (to create AI avatars) without any kind of accountability to the communities from which these people come.
“This is AI blackface – people can just create artworks, create people, (but) they’re not actually connecting with indigenous people.”
The potential for harm is twofold: such accounts default to sharing “tasty” or “comforting” aspects of Indigenous cultural knowledge and experience rather than the more complex reality; And it also has the potential to increase racism.
“I was looking at the comments of Bush Legend’s latest post. We see the same racist comments that we know the crowd gets online. We see that again applies to an AI person as well,” she says.
Professor Toby Walsh, award-winning fellow and scientist in artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, says AI has been trained to reproduce and present information through massive data sets with implicit biases, meaning it is not immune to racist or prejudicial content.
“They’ll carry the biases of that training data,” he says. “Certain groups may be stereotyped because the video data or image data that is online is somewhat stereotyped into that group. So we’ll continue to maintain that stereotype going forward.”
Guardian Australia attempted to contact the page’s creator via multiple social media accounts and email but has yet to receive a response.
The Bush Legend account appears to have addressed the criticism through its avatar, saying that the page does not seek to “represent any culture or group.” “This channel is only about animal stories,” AI Creations said in a video last week.
It states that the page is “not asking for money, donations or support” and that the content is “free to view”, and suggests people to “scroll off” if they don’t like it. The plug previously asked followers to subscribe at $2.99 per month.
Meta has been contacted for further comment.
Walsh says that while digital literacy can help users identify AI content, it is becoming harder to identify the “tells” that help them identify it. “If not now, then in the near future, it will become almost impossible to identify whether it was real or fake,” says Walsh.
“We used to believe the things we see, because before the things you saw were largely real things.
“It’s not hard to fake stuff anymore. It’s incredibly easy to fake stuff in a very convincing way, so we’re going to push the boundaries of what’s true and what’s false.”
