The AI virtual character Xiaohai uses a tragic persona to attract middle-aged and elderly women and sell products, with over 600 million views on a single platform

[[**The AI virtual character "Xiaohai" attracts middle-aged and elderly women with a tragic yet sunny persona, then harvests their trust through livestream selling with high commissions; related videos have over 600 million views on a single platform, and after exposure the account stopped updating and deleted posts, but similar scams may recur.**

**Key Points**

**1. The tragic persona precisely extracts elderly people's trust**

A 79-year-old grandmother from Urumqi traveled alone 2,735 kilometers to Yuncheng to meet "Xiaohai," and after being told by railway police that he was AI-generated, she turned back; Xiaohai's background, illness, and school bullying were fabricated in bulk by multiple accounts.

**2. Traffic was then converted into high-commission livestream selling**

After accumulating followers, the accounts promoted laundry detergent, cooking oil, ejiao, and cosmetics under the guise of helping farmers and college students sell goods; a Beijing News investigation said production costs were low and could be automated, earning two to three thousand yuan a day, with livestream selling commissions reaching 52%.

**3. Spread reached 600 million views, with concentrated deletion of posts after exposure**

CCTV News said Xiaohai-related videos had over 600 million views on a single platform; after multiple media reports, the creators stopped updating and deleted works in bulk, with related pages mostly left only with news-watermark archives.

**4. Elderly people's trust is hard for family to talk them out of, and scams easily regenerate**

This article is from the WeChat public account: 3DM Game Network, author: Xiaomian Huizi, cover image from: AI-generated

This was a rare journey for love by a 79-year-old grandmother.

Without telling her family, she privately bought a train ticket and set off alone from Urumqi to a strange city that might otherwise have had no intersection with her life at all—Yuncheng, Shanxi.

The ticketing app showed the two cities were 2,735 kilometers apart. If not considering transferring to high-speed rail or bullet trains, the elderly person would have to endure more than thirty hours on an aisle seat where she could barely perch at the edge of a tray table. Undoubtedly, this was a hard-seat marathon. It was a huge test of physical and mental health and willpower, and also a burden.

But the grandmother did not care. As long as she got to Yuncheng, everything would be fine. Because there was someone she deeply loved, someone who deeply loved her—Doubao... oh! No, Xiaohai. And Xiaohai was worth her making these sacrifices.

Unfortunately, the grandmother's journey was still forced to stop. She got off the train midway and turned back to Urumqi. Yuncheng thus receded into the distance again.

At 79 and illiterate, she could not understand what high-tech thing the railway police meant by "A(a)I(i)-generated," nor could she figure out how Xiaohai, who affectionately called her "auntie mom" and kept saying he was a high school boy from Yuncheng, could live in a place far more distant than Yuncheng, and was a prefabricated kid born from that auntie with the two foreign letters.

And what the elderly person also did not know afterward was that this letter auntie could give birth far more prolifically than all the top breeding boars in the production team she knew put together. Until the new internet wave called "AI Xiaohai" swept away both the wallets and emotional trust of "auntie moms," a variant branch of "family members." Until "AI XX" officially became closely related to every one of us.

The above is a story that happened in May this year, and it is also news that only received widespread exposure now, in October—the "AI character Xiaohai selling misery incident." And the narrative protagonist like the one above, that 79-year-old grandmother, is merely an ordinary yet highly representative typical example in this "Xiaohai" vortex.

And this is actually a question that cannot be answered comprehensively in one or two sentences.

Because Xiaohai's background alone would be enough for him to spend tens of minutes introducing his family on a TV variety talent show ten years ago.

In the words of the Urumqi grandmother, Xiaohai comes from Yuncheng, Shanxi. But in fact, Xiaohai belongs to all of China. Every day he studies in various provinces across the motherland, sometimes in high school, sometimes for a while in college. Today he looks like this, tomorrow he will grow into that, averaging dozens to hundreds of plastic surgeries a day, only to present the most perfect and flawless side to his favorite auntie moms.

Moreover, although Xiaohai has only just become an adult, he has a first half of life that can be called full of misfortune. According to the video's self-narration, he actively participated in campus activities in high school but was tragically bullied by classmates. Because the family had no money, this single-parent family consisting of father and son could only barely get by on the elderly father's work.

And as the saying goes, "hemp rope always breaks at the thin part," Xiaohai and his father both have constitutions very prone to illness. In the videos it is often the father sick and the son caring for him, or the son sick and the father caring for him, which undoubtedly made an already poor life even harder.

Fortunately, misfortune did not cling only to this miserable pair. Although father and son were often hospitalized, they were still lucky enough never to be sick at the same time; it always came one after another. On that hospital bed, often Xiaohai lay there on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the old dad lay there on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, with birthdays on Sundays... life was still fairly fulfilling.

In addition, Xiaohai in the videos never gets discouraged or depressed. When looking at the auntie moms, he is always energetic, handsome, and smiling, revealing the confidence and sunshine that elderly people idealize in young children. He also gazes deeply into the camera, asks after the auntie moms on the other side of the screen, and directly confesses his love for them.

For example, although Xiaohai's family is poor and he is bullied by classmates, he can only hide alone in an empty classroom looking at baozi and gnawing mantou. But the baozi cannot be eaten; it is left for the auntie moms. And for the older generation, who attach considerable importance to eating enough and dressing warmly, this kind of melodrama is actually equivalent to the Gugu Gaga and Doro we watch, producing roughly similar emotional fluctuations in each person's heart.

However, although it is cruel, we know that Gugu Gaga and Doro are virtual, and the little stories above naturally seem even more fake than fake to us. Even if one pretends not to see the AI-generated label, the video content is usually full of holes, with a feeling of a makeshift troupe.

For example, "studying nationwide" is because the AI Xiaohai image is operated by multiple accounts, so the IP locations are naturally different. As for topics like taking turns being sick and buying a meat bun for auntie, just mentioning them alone gives a helpless sense of logic seemingly not existing.

Staying by the bedside without leaving for a moment, door outside.ver

But for some elderly groups who can become its core audience, these problems are hard to see. Without any derogatory meaning, it is a fairly normal physiological phenomenon for elderly people's thinking to become slow and muddled, and sometimes accompanying the elderly has to be treated like taking care of a big child. Even if you look at only this dimension, you could completely regard AI Xiaohai as a good means specifically used to make the elderly happy and provide them with emotional value. And in this case, if you then go on to argue about plot logic problems, it is like saying in a gugu gaga support group, "She doesn't even exist, I don't understand why you like her"—it is being oblivious to the mood.

But the problem is, if the creators of these AI videos really only wanted to carry out love and peace and incidentally earn a little scattered traffic money from the platform, then there would naturally be no need to write an article about this matter, and it would not enter a serious news livestream room. Thus, AI Xiaohai must have its unknown dark side—the elderly's love for Xiaohai may be pure, but behind this virtual character is full of deep scheming.

As for what is in the dark side, it is also easy to guess. After having a certain fan base, such accounts indeed, following the logic of internet growth, without exception turned to the dependent path of livestream selling and promotion. So you can see that the diligent and eager-to-learn Xiaohai will participate in college student agricultural assistance activities, and with tears streaming down his face promote the non-GMO laundry detergent that the farmer uncles have just picked from the fields.

Or, Xiaohai in a parallel universe will also want to achieve a good result in the "College Student Livestream Selling Competition," so that his long efforts will not be in vain. Thus, he naturally and smoothly peddles to his dearest and most beloved aunties and mothers cooking oil, ejiao, cosmetics, and other supposedly high-quality 3C goods said to be endorsed by manufacturers.

At this time, the moving tragic pasts of Xiaohai—"single-parent family," "poor grades," "school bullying," "frequently hospitalized"—in turn become the emotional driving force that pushes the aunties and mothers to click into the purchase links and get on the little yellow cart, and his originally positive, ambitious, unwilling-to-lose persona is reversed into something close to the coquettish selling of a borderline streamer.

In addition, those rains that are overused in model elementary school essays and never stop falling also begin touring campuses across the country, pulling the elderly's emotions back to the era anchor of "deep feelings, misty rain," and speeding up the clicking of links in their hands.

And these tricks, to young netizens who are deeply familiar with internet routines, are obvious: as soon as they see the protagonist in a short video abruptly start introducing how utterly unnoticed the water he is drinking is, they will immediately realize that this advertising interlude is very likely the vinegar for which the whole video, or even the operation of this account, is the dumpling, and then switch to another viewing mentality to prevent abduction-style consumption.

But the elderly group generally does not have this collective consciousness. When they see their precious Xiaohai crying like a bullied child, begging them to buy some daily goods they might use, the thought of "support him a bit" often appears before doubt. And even if they cannot use it themselves, some of them will post long comments expressing their apologies and thanks, waiting for the next suitable opportunity to come again.

In this case, even if the young people at home lay out evidence in fine detail and analyze the scam, the elderly will not necessarily listen, and may even interpret the "AI-generated" label that their family members personally pointed out to them as meaning that their Xiaohai, for various unspeakable reasons, cannot be filmed by a real person and has no choice but to use this roundabout way to secretly ask them for help—no matter how you argue it, there is always some reason to deal with it.

So at this point, when reasoning does not work, the young netizens switch to a new-era tactic of "if you can't beat them, join them" and begin making AI Xiaohai videos themselves. The works produced by their hands often start from speculation about the reality behind it, shaping Xiaohai into the most "lost generation" figure in the eyes of elderly people: domineering, rogue, and knowing only how to ask for money.

This image, completely opposite to Xiaohai's personality, is also called "Evil Xiaohai" by netizens. He often beats and scolds the aunties and mothers in the videos, points at their faces up close to demand their property, and says outright that he was only acting before, just teasing them for fun.

Or they may also wear an Akihabara-style white-stocking maid outfit that is hard to accept under traditional ideas, lie coquettishly in the arms of mighty men such as Sun Xiaochuan and the Beast Senpai, and then hint at even more shocking filthy things that have already happened behind the scenes.

But after seeing these videos, those aunties and mothers who like Xiaohai will still say in the comments that they do not believe it is true, and even post tearful long comments saying that Xiaohai must have some hidden difficulty. And for those who make AI Xiaohai videos, such reactions are probably long expected. Rather, only this degree of emotional investment can earn them enough revenue to treat this business as their main occupation.

According to CCTV News, the cumulative views of "Xiaohai"-related videos on a single platform have reached over 600 million, and actual investigation by Beijing News reporters found that the production cost of such videos is quite low and transparent, everyone can use it, and it fully supports automated production, with earning two or three thousand a day being no problem.

And the bulk of such creators' revenue, namely marketing and selling goods, was obtained by the Beijing News author through personal involvement as a high commission ratio figure of 52% for livestream selling. Under this low-input, high-return business model, if the overall crude production quality of such works is compared to a so-called "amateur troupe," then that becomes the best cover for the professional industrial chain behind it.

And after being widely reported by multiple media outlets, those platform creators producing "poor miserable Xiaohai" videos stopped updating one after another, and even began deleting past works in batches. By the time I was writing this article, searching "Xiaohai" on relevant short video platforms could only show some of them with various news watermarks attached.

So, in fact, most of the images earlier in this article are just secondhand sources I dug up that have been archived on the internet, and these retained materials, under the platform's repeated suppression, have also begun to inevitably become distorted along with Xiaohai's figure and deeds. The love and blessings that once overflowed in the comment sections have also, with Xiaohai's own departure, become a history that can only be told orally. And those aunties and mothers who once gathered together to form "thousands+" and "tens of thousands+" traffic have also, because information can no longer be traced, briefly returned to their respective real lives, returned to their own Urumqi.

In 2011 there was a skit called "Willingly." It tells a small story about an elderly mother at home who is addicted to TV shopping and buys a lot of counterfeit and shoddy street-stall goods, making the whole family uncomfortable and causing conflicts. At the end of the plot, the inferior rice cooker the old mother bought suddenly explodes amid the quarreling. Just when the son, daughter-in-law, and audience all think the old mother will repent, she instead hugs the rice cooker and runs straight out the door, closing this farce with an O. Henry ending line: "When I bought it, they said it can be exchanged if it breaks."

Compared with today's news, although it lacks an emotional projection point and does not seem to be fully equivalent, in fact you can completely regard that broken rice cooker as a kind of concretized abstract Xiaohai—both are treated as treasures in the same way, and both are trusted stubbornly in the same way.

It is just that 15 years have passed, and the TV shopping ads full of eight stars and eight swords have also advanced with the times for those core audiences locked in their information cocoons, evolving into more charming adult forms, and compared with before having more lethality of kinship, romance, or illicit love.

But at this time, even after 15 years, groups of deceived people made up of the new elderly and the old elderly can still be assembled in multiple groups, impulsively consuming on some goods they do not need at all, and waiting for a new round of exposure and evolution. And because of this, the Urumqis are also destined, shortly after dispersing, to head again toward Yuncheng.

It can be said that as long as the feelings of the new generation of aunties and mothers can continue to be exploited, "Xiaohai" will be resurrected countless times, and once again use 01 code and computer graphics color blocks to prop up new hypocritical smiles and mourning, and stir up new tsunamis... until everything is swept up and the community around is left in a mess.

Until on the shoals, only indifference and trolls remain.

This article is from the WeChat public account: 3DM Game Network, author: Xiaomian Huizi Channel: Society and Culture. This content is published with the author's authorization, and the views represent only the author himself and do not represent the position of Huxiu. If you have any objections or complaints about this manuscript, please contact tougao@huxiu.com. Those who are changing and want to change the world are all on the Huxiu APP[ ]]]