From La Fontaine to Lego: Characters as Ideological Delivery Systems

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cute characters as ideological delivery systems, and how AI accelerated the propaganda playbook.

Kind of crazy that the big propaganda medium to come out of AI wasn't deepfakes but LEGO men and Persian cats https://t.co/PEzEiamwJg
— Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) April 9, 2026

Tracy Alloway nailed it: “Kind of crazy that the big propaganda medium to come out of AI wasn’t deepfakes but LEGO men and Persian cats.”

Everyone was bracing for deepfakes. The national security community spent years warning about synthetic video of world leaders saying things they never said, doctored footage designed to deceive at the pixel level. Instead, what showed up was Lego minifigures of Trump and Netanyahu set to AI-generated rap tracks, produced by an Iran-based group calling themselves the “Explosive News Team”. And it wasn’t just Iran. Chinese state media CCTV joined in with its own GenAI animal fable: “The White Eagle and Persian Cat”, a stop-motion style animation where a White Eagle Alliance dominates trade by forcing other animals to use its currency. Not trying to fool anyone into thinking the footage was real. Just trying to be catchy, shareable, and memetically sticky.

GenAI on Matt Suiche

From La Fontaine to Lego: Characters as Ideological Delivery Systems