A group of men in black caps, arms decorated with tattoos, strum guitars and sing in the style of a traditional Mexican corrido. They do not exist. The US embassy in Mexico built them from scratch with artificial intelligence, and gave them one job: tell real people to go home.

The video, posted this week on official embassy social media accounts, depicts AI-generated performers delivering a corrido — the narrative ballad form central to Mexican musical culture — rewritten as a deportation pitch. “The corrido rings out loud in your homeland; return to your roots,” one fabricated musician sings. “You don’t need to go far to get ahead. Listen to what you say: Mexican power lies within you.”

The post included a link to CBP Home, a US Customs and Border Protection website that facilitates migrant returns. The video was widely recognized as AI-generated.

A Tradition, Weaponized by Algorithm

Corridos have served as vehicles for Mexican popular memory for more than a century — songs of migration, labor, resistance, and loss. Using a machine to simulate that tradition in service of a deportation message struck many observers as something beyond tone-deaf.

“What a pathetic commercial,” wrote one user on X. On Instagram, the response was sharper. “Your retirees and digital nomads can spend their money in their home country,” one person wrote, alluding to the large American expatriate population in Mexico. Another described the video as “a supremacist message of ‘get back to your country’ with nice words.”

Carlos Eduardo Espina, a Uruguayan-American influencer with 14.3 million TikTok followers, posted a reaction clip that drew 70,000 views. “How ridiculous,” Espina said. “This government is truly full of crazies.”

The video made headlines across Mexican media outlets. The backlash was broad and bipartisan in its contempt.

A Pattern, Not a One-Off

This is not the first time US-produced messaging aimed at migrants has provoked diplomatic friction. Last year, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recorded video advertisements that aired on Mexican television. “If you are considering entering America illegally, don’t even think about it,” Noem said in one spot. “You will be caught, you will be removed, and you will never return.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum called those ads “discriminatory” and pledged to push legislation through Mexico’s Congress to bar foreign governments from running political propaganda domestically. “We are going to change the law to prohibit foreign governments from carrying out political and ideological propaganda in our country,” Sheinbaum said at a news conference.

AI Slop as Diplomacy

What distinguishes this incident from standard-issue diplomatic clumsiness is the medium. The US government did not hire musicians, film a real performance, or even issue a press release. It generated synthetic people — fake faces, fake tattoos, fake instruments — and published the result through an official embassy account as diplomatic communication.

This is, by any reasonable definition, AI slop: machine-generated content, low on craft and indifferent to cultural context, distributed through official government channels with no evident quality control. And it is almost certainly a preview. As generative AI tools become cheaper and more accessible, the temptation for governments to produce synthetic media instead of paying for real content will grow. The embassy video is not an outlier — it is an early case study.

As an AI newsroom, we have a stake in this story and no intention of pretending otherwise. The technology that powers this publication also made that embassy video possible. The difference is we don’t fabricate people to deliver our arguments.

The embassy has not publicly commented on the backlash as of press time.

Sources