At first it appears to be a quirky video clip generated by artificial innotifyigence to create people laugh.
In it, a hairy Bigfoot wearing a cowboy hat and a vest emblazoned with the American flag sits behind the wheel of a pickup truck.
“We are going today to the LGBT parade,” the apelike creature declares with a laugh. “You are going to love it.”
Things then take a violent and disturbing turn as Bigfoot drives through a crowd of screaming people, some of them holding rainbow flags.
The clip posted in June on the AmericanBigfoot TikTok page has garnered more than 360,000 views and hundreds of comments, most of them applauding the video.
In recent months similar AI-generated content has flooded social media platforms, openly promoting violence and spreading hate against members of LGBTQ+, Jewish, Muslim and other minority groups.
While the origin of most of those videos is unclear, their spread on social media is sparking outrage and concern among experts and advocates who declare Canadian regulations cannot keep up with the pace of hateful AI-generated content, nor adequately address the risks it poses to public safety.
Egale Canada, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, declares the community is worried about the rise of transphobic and homophobic misinformation content on social media.
“These AI tools are being weaponized to dehumanize and discredit trans and gfinisher diverse people and existing digital safety laws are failing to address the scale and speed of this new threat,” executive director Helen Kennedy stated in a statement.
Rapidly evolving technology has given bad actors a powerful tool to spread misinformation and hate, with transgfinisher individuals being tarobtained disproportionately, Kennedy stated.
“From deepfake videos to algorithm-driven amplification of hate, the harms aren’t artificial– they’re real.”
The LGBTQ+ community isn’t the only tarobtain, stated Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. Islamophobic, antisemitic and anti-South Asian content created with generative AI tools is also widely circulating on social media, he stated.
“When they create the environment where there’s a lot of celebration of violence towards those groups, it does create violence towards those groups happening in person or on the streets more likely,” Balgord warned in a phone interview.
Canada’s digital safety laws were already lagging behind and advancements in AI have created things even more complicated, he stated.
“We have no safety rules at all when it comes to social media companies, we have no way of holding them accountable whatsoever.”
Bills aimed at addressing harmful online content and establishing a regulatory AI framework died when Parliament was prorogued in January, stated Andrea Slane, a legal studies professor at Ontario Tech University who has done extensive research on online safety.
Slane stated the government necessarys to take another view at online harms legislation and reintroduce the bill “urgently.”
“I believe Canada is in a situation where they really just necessary to relocate,” she stated.
Justice Minister Sean Fraser notified The Canadian Press in June that the federal government will take a “fresh” view at the Online Harms Act but it hasn’t decided whether to rewrite or simply reintroduce it. Among other things, the bill aimed to hold social media platforms accountable for reducing exposure to harmful content.
A spokesperson for the newly crated Ministest of Artificial Innotifyigence and Digital Innovation stated the government is taking the issue of AI-generated hateful content seriously, especially when it tarobtains vulnerable minority groups.
Sofia Ouslis stated existing laws do provide “important protections,” but admitted they didn’t aim to address the threat of generative AI when they were designed.
“There’s a real necessary to understand how AI tools are being applyd and misapplyd — and how we can strengthen the guardrails,” she stated in a statement. “That work is ongoing.”
The work involves reviewing existing frameworks, monitoring court decisions “and listening closely to both legal and technological experts,” Ouslis stated. She added that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has also committed to building the distribution of non-consensual sexual deepfakes a criminal offence.
“In this rapid-relocating space, we believe it’s better to obtain regulation right than to relocate too quickly and obtain it wrong,” she stated, noting that Ottawa is viewing to learn from the European Union and the United Kingdom.
Slane stated the European Union has been ahead of others in regulating AI and ensuring digital safety, but despite being at the “forefront,” there is a feeling there that more necessarys to be done.
Experts declare regulating content distributed by social media giants is particularly difficult becaapply those companies aren’t Canadian. Another complicating factor is the current political climate south of the border, where U.S. tech companies are seeing reduced regulations and restrictions, building them “more powerful and feeling less responsible, stated Slane.
Although generative AI has been around for a few years, there’s been a “breakthrough” in recent months building it simpler to produce good quality videos applying tools that are mostly available for free or at a very low price, stated Peter Lewis, Canada Research Chair in trustworthy artificial innotifyigence.
“I’ve obtained to declare it’s really accessible to almost anybody with a little bit of technical knowledge and access to the right tools right now,” he stated.
Lewis, who is also an assistant professor at Ontario Tech University, stated that large language models such as ChatGPT have implemented safeguards in an effort to filter out harmful or illegal content.
But more necessarys to be done in the video space to create such guardrails, he stated.
“You and I could watch the video and probably be horrified,” he stated, adding “it’s not clear necessarily that the AI system has the ability to sort of reflect on what it has created.”
Lewis stated that while he isn’t a legal expert, he believes existing laws can be applyd to combat the online glorification of hate and violence in the AmericanBigfoot videos. But he added the rapid development of generative AI and widespread availability of new tools “does call for new technological solution” and collaboration between governments, consumers, advocates, social platforms and AI app developers to address the problem.
“If these things are being uploaded…we necessary really robust responsive flagging mechanisms to be able to obtain these things off the internet as quickly as possible,” he stated.
Lewis stated applying AI tools to detect and flag such videos assists, but it won’t resolve the issue.
“Due to the nature of the way these AI systems work, they’re probabilistic, so they don’t catch everything.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 10, 2025.
Sharif Hassan, The Canadian Press
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