the UN gave them money to research ways the UN could use AI, so that is what they did
No, no, no, that's not an excuse.
If they were, in good faith, researching ways the UN could use AI, this fucking horrible idea would have been thrown out in the first round of brainstorming.
This is a horrible idea. This is a stupid idea. We live in a world where most of the privileged wealthy West is desperate to pretend that refugees aren't real, or don't matter, or deserve to live in poverty. And creating fake AI refugees just gives the privileged wealthy West another way to excuse themselves, by dismissing what the AI says is fake, by telling themselves there aren't any real people in situations that bad.
If you're getting to the point where you're implementing an obviously horrible idea and asking for public feedback on it, you don't get to blame the people who told you to come up with ideas. You should have thrown that bad idea out. You should not have implemented it. That's on you.
At this point, I'm thinking about the silver lining. If a web of federal and state laws require everybody to prove their identity to some central identity broker, in order to prove they aren't underage, before creating an account on Facebook or YouTube or TikTok, that's going to interfere with a lot of spambot and AI garbage.
It's a horrible privacy violation, of course. But at this point, with AI chatbots that are indistinguishable from humans, I don't see how we can effectively restrict account creation to humans without some sort of oracle confirming an online account is an actual human being.