AI-generated athlete accounts raise concerns at UBC

Jordyn Hayes and Emma Ho are new players on the UBC women’s volleyball team.

But you won’t catch either of them on the official roster, because they don’t exist.

Instead, Hayes and Ho are AI-generated creations, pretending to be sexualized UBC varsity athletes.

The biggest tell? It’s how perfect they look.

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While some of the images on Ho and Hayes’ pages are generated entirely with AI, others have stolen the photos of real women and manipulated them.

For instance, one photo on Hayes’ account was taken from the Instagram of a volleyball player at North Park University in Chicago.

Likewise, Ho’s page has stolen photos from another U.S. student’s Instagram as well as Hannah Dods from the UBC women’s hockey team.

SFU professor Steve DiPaola says the point of these pages is to take you off Instagram to somewhere private.

“The main thing they’re doing is trying to move you on to an OnlyFans page,” DiPaola said.

Even though neither account is stealing the real identities of UBC volleyball players, law professor Emily Laidlaw says it takes away from the work female athletes have put in to be taken seriously.

“It certainly undermines that when AI is being used to create these heavily sexualized images of women in sports,” she said.

Unfortunately, the consequences for those creating these accounts are extremely limited, with social media platforms often ignoring complaints about specific accounts.

Thankfully for UBC, though, it looks like this time the system worked.

In a statement, UBC spokesperson Thandi Fletcher said, “After UBC reported the posts and accounts to Instagram, they were removed. We encourage any affected students to reach out to the university for support.”

As of Monday afternoon, however, the accounts were still active with many of the same images still visible.