Former New York City mayor Eric Adams has found himself starring in a deeply weird corner of the internet: a string of surreal, AI-spliced videos on Chinese social platforms that recast him as everything from a church preacher to, quite literally, Jesus Christ.
In one clip, a cloned voice over real footage of Adams calmly announces, “My name is Eric Leroy Adams, I am Jesus Christ.” The short videos mash together real visuals of Adams with machine-translated Chinese scripts and synthetic voiceovers tuned to mimic his rhythm and delivery. They are low-budget, off-the-shelf AI jobs that still manage to be unsettling in how easily they remake a public figure’s face and voice.
As reported by the New York Post, the creator behind the clips is not a Beijing troll farm but a Cincinnati-based user posting as Prognoz Pogodi. Pogodi told the outlet he mutes the original audio, runs Chinese captions through machine translation, then runs the lines through a voice-cloning service trained to sound like Adams. “I’ll have the voice clone do a few takes and pick the best one,” he explained of his process.
Local outlet Hell Gate tracked the format back to a niche style of Chinese “life-hack” collage video that gets constantly revoiced and resubtitled for English-speaking feeds. In this ecosystem, public-figure footage is just another ingredient: creators combine cheap cloning tools and basic video editors to turn politicians into absurd, endlessly recyclable meme characters, Hell Gate noted.
What the clips show
The Adams clips drop the former mayor into a series of bizarre scenarios. In one, he appears in a church setting while the synthetic voice makes sweeping, pseudo-religious declarations. In another, the footage plays over everyday life-hack material, with a fake Adams calmly narrating cooking instructions and routine chores like he is hosting a self-help show.
The New York Post cataloged several examples, including the viral clip where the cloned voice dials things all the way up and flatly declares, “I am Jesus Christ.” The effect is less polished Hollywood deepfake and more surreal internet collage, but it still rides on the authority of a recognizable face and familiar cadence.
Why experts are uneasy
Security researchers and journalists say that is exactly the problem. The same off-the-shelf tools powering these oddball memes are already being used for far more serious mischief. The Associated Press has documented how cloned voices and deepfake videos have been deployed in scams, robocalls and political operations, with targets sometimes having little idea they are listening to algorithmic impostors.
Experts warn that detection technology and legal protections are trailing behind what anyone with a laptop and a credit card can now do. The barrier to entry has basically collapsed, which means everything from goofy Adams-as-Jesus bits to real disinformation campaigns can run on nearly identical tech.
Legal and policy stakes
In Washington, lawmakers are scrambling to catch up. This summer, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced legislation that would establish a specific right over a person’s voice and likeness, and require major platforms to take down unauthorized deepfakes.
The proposed “NO FAKES” measure, as detailed by Roll Call, would carve out space for parody and news while putting liability on distributors of unlicensed synthetic content. The idea is to protect people from being turned into involuntary AI puppets without nuking satire or legitimate reporting.
How this ties to Adams' past use of AI
For Adams, the whole episode comes with an extra twist of irony. His own administration previously leaned on AI voice technology for official outreach, using a synthetic version of his voice to send multilingual robocalls across the city.
Voicebot reported that the city used cloned Adams audio in other languages to boost communication, a tactic that quickly sparked blowback over disclosure and consent. Critics questioned whether residents should have to guess when they are hearing an elected official and when they are hearing an algorithm in costume.
For now, the Chinese-platform videos come off more like bizarre internet performance art than a coordinated disinformation push. Still, they highlight an uncomfortable reality: once your face and voice are in the public domain, they can be remixed into almost anything, at scale, in minutes. Platforms, lawmakers and everyday users are all trying to catch up to that world. The Adams clips are just one strange reminder that the future they are worrying about is already here.
