Valeriia Litvinova Cunningham was pursuing her master’s degree at North Carolina State University as the war intensified in Ukraine.
She helped her parents and sister Anya start a new life in North Carolina.
“They basically came here with just the clothes they were wearing,” Cunningham said.
Once reunited, her family went to the gym. It quickly became an escape. “We started strength training together to distract ourselves from what was going on and also to do something together as a family,” Cunningham said.
She started posting family gym sessions on social media. Anya, who has Down syndrome, quickly became an inspiration to their growing community of online followers.
“We saw so much progress in Anya’s confidence and she started to have a sense of belonging at the gym.”
“All our lives we were told that Anya wouldn’t be able to achieve anything, that she wouldn’t even be able to walk. Now she’s bodybuilding; she’s in the gym with other bodybuilders, with weightlifters, and she just trained them,” Cunningham said.
The sisters’ online community has evolved into a workout class for people with Down syndrome through GiGi’s Playhouse, a nonprofit organization that provides resources to people with Down syndrome of all ages. They call it strength without labels.
“We have really proven, and we hope to continue to prove, every day that she is not defined by her diagnosis,” Cunningham said. “Our participants can see that they belong in a gym with other people. They don’t need to be separated into a separate group. They can train with everyone, and that’s what’s important.”
As their numbers grew, so did the skeptics.
“People accuse Anya of not being real, because these days apparently we have to fight artificial intelligence, and that’s exactly why people now have a hard time distinguishing between what’s real and what’s not.”
WRAL investigators met Anya in person during a training class. However, we also found an account, @MiaTriso21, on TikTok and Instagram that some people online said modeled its face after Anya’s to take on the bodies of other creators.
“To be honest, I can’t even believe I’m having this conversation right now, especially since…I’ve been sharing our journey on social media and fighting all these stereotypes. Now I’m fighting against AI-generated content or fabricated content,” Cunningham told WRAL Investigates.
“These accounts borrow the body, voice and public trust of a real creator, put an AI face on top, and then monetize that trust,” said Laeeq Khan, director of the Social Media Analytics Research Lab at Ohio University.
Khan says social media platforms tend to rely on victim reporting.
“If someone didn’t report it, it goes undetected,” he said.
Sometimes reporting it isn’t enough.
“Sometimes I would get a response saying that something that was AI-generated wasn’t, so the reports would claim that ‘We didn’t find this content to be AI-generated,’ and then I would have to fight back. I can’t believe I’m spending this much time trying to fight a robot,” Cunningham said.
Both TikTok and Meta require AI-generated content to be labeled and have policies in place to remove videos that violate their respective community guidelines. However, WRAL Investigates found that several videos were still being posted without the proper labels.
We asked TikTok and Meta what they were doing to find (AI-generated) profiles/content that might be slipping through the cracks.
Meta did not respond to our repeated requests.
TikTok said it uses C2PA Content Credentials technology, which tracks the origin and edit history of digital content. The company also said it was testing detection systems to target accounts dedicated to posting AI-generated spam.
Since WRAL Investigates began asking questions about @MiaTriso21, the account has been removed from TikTok and Instagram. However, other versions of the same account are already circulating.
If something seems perfect, Khan warns, be skeptical. And if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Gn bussni
