Robots, fraught consumers star in China AI videos mocking tariffs

By Antoni Slodkowski

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s state-run media has taken to the internet with AI-generated videos, featuring dancing robots and fraught consumers, to chide U.S. President Donald Trump and tariffs they say threaten high inflation and economic distress for Americans.

“‘Liberation Day’, you promised us the stars. But tariffs killed our cheap Chinese cars,” an automated female voice sings in a video on the website of China’s CGTN, a state-run English-language broadcaster, over a shot of a woman at a kitchen table staring at an empty fork.

The two-minute, 42-second clip, referring to Trump’s use of “Liberation Day” for the day of his tariff announcement, was captioned with a warning: “Track is AI-generated. The debt crisis? 100 percent human-made.”

Another video posted on the X.com page of state-run news agency Xinhua, also generated by artificial intelligence, shows a robot named TARIFF that chooses to self-destruct rather than follow its creator’s orders for high tariffs that bring “trade wars and unrest”.

China has sharply criticised the U.S. tariffs, which have triggered the biggest stock market rout since the pandemic, and retaliated on Friday with import duties and export curbs of its own.

Economists say consumers are likely to see higher prices due to the trade war and that the U.S. economy could enter a downturn, while some U.S. trade partners are putting their own levies on American products – effects that Trump has called a “disturbance”.

The CGTN video, which displays lyrics in English and Chinese over images of car factories and humanoid robots dancing in burned-out streets, makes a more dire assessment.

“You taxed each truck, you taxed each tire. Midwest burnin’ in your dumpster fire,” the automated voice sings.

(Reporting by Antoni Slodkowski and Qiaoyi Li; Editing by Edmund Klamann)