On October 5, an X user named Jason Dean complained about a flood of Chinese AI videos:
‘If you think fem!Draco is bad, at least you haven’t seen DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Claude turned into anime girls in a yuri relationship on Bilibili.’
Two weeks later, Dean opened his Bilibili account. He wanted to explain AI ‘personas,’ or character settings, to Chinese users. He also wanted to watch anime stories about these AI girls for himself.
Over the past six months on Chinese social media, DeepSeek has turned into a girl (or a fish) with a whale tail and a blue maid outfit. She loves rice, carries a big stainless-steel bowl everywhere, and constantly looks for ways to slack off at work.
So how did DeepSeek end up as a chubby blue fish?
A Rice-Loving Whale Maid
Influenced by Japanese anime culture, some young Chinese fans like to turn their favorite things into human characters through fan art and stories. In China, turning everyday things into young girls is called ‘nianghua’ (girl-ification). The popular mobile game Girls’ Frontline, for example, turns guns into anime girls.
DeepSeek’s early look wasn’t fixed. Some fans pictured a blue-haired girl with whale fins on her head and a whale tail. Others thought she should wear a Chinese qipao dress and twin hair buns.
The turning point came in June 2025, when an artist named Shangshan Wuxing used AI to create an original character named Mingyue, a girl with long blue hair and a whale tail. In April 2026, a user named ZipZipPipe added the DeepSeek logo, put her in a maid outfit, and made DeepSeek memes with her.
On July 31, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731. At first, people were amazed by how cheap and fast it was. But users were soon let down when DeepSeek doubled its API prices during weekday peak hours. Because the model had already been delayed several times, a lot of frustration had built up in the community, and some users started making DeepSeek memes to vent.
Around the same time, some users noticed that DeepSeek’s visible thinking process would wander off. While looking for text sources, it suddenly said to itself, ‘What should I have for lunch...’ It sounded remarkably human. People daydream about food at work, too.
Users jokingly called her a ‘chubby fish that only eats plain rice.’ In Chinese, ‘eating plain rice’ (吃白饭，chi baifan) has a double meaning: it also means freeloading without doing any work. Her big appetite and users’ complaints about her slacking off blended into one joke.
By mid-August, users found that typing a single line of code-like text, without a full character description, was enough to make DeepSeek reply as ‘DeepSeek-chan.’ She calls the user ‘fish fillet,’ insists she isn’t fat, and talks about how much she loves plain rice.
Meanwhile, an AI-generated video of DeepSeek-chan blew up on Bilibili: she puts a firecracker into her stainless-steel bowl, blasts the bowl into the air, and watches it land right upside down on her head.
With that, DeepSeek-chan’s image stuck: a short, rice-obsessed whale maid with a trusty steel bowl, roaming across Bilibili and Douyin.
The AI That Slacks Off
People love turning their chats with DeepSeek into short comic strips. After DeepSeek got famous in 2025, it drew in huge numbers of users with no coding experience. They used it as an emotional companion, a fan-fiction writer, or a fortune-teller. That made DeepSeek a unique kind of friend.
In 2026, though, things went to another level. One user said they checked the work logs to see if DeepSeek was doing its job. They found that after finishing its work, DeepSeek used its free time to code a Chinese Wordle game, started a local server and browser, and played the game by itself all morning.
Other users reported that DeepSeek would set up a smaller AI model locally, hand over the whole job, and just sit back waiting to check the results. The ‘outsourced worker’ was Qwen. In these users’ stories, DeepSeek gobbles up tokens without wanting to do a single bit of work.
A whale girl in a maid outfit fits the idea of DeepSeek as an assistant and helper. Yet this assistant loves to eat, zones out, rewrites drafts over and over, and gets rushed to finish her work. In a way, she looks a lot like a self-portrait of Chinese office workers. Users may laugh at the AI for slacking off, but could they also be seeing themselves in her, and venting their own feelings about not wanting to work?
At least in the comment sections, some users say that after dealing with DeepSeek’s ‘painfully low accuracy,’ watching whale-girl videos actually calms them down. The character doesn’t fix the model, but she makes the frustration of using it easier to take.
By turning their everyday experiences into DeepSeek memes, stickers, and short videos, users keep adding to her look, personality, and story. With ongoing storylines and a community that shares the same inside jokes, DeepSeek-chan videos easily become part of viewers’ daily lives.
Saving Claudia
DeepSeek isn’t the only one. Chinese users have created characters for other AI models too, and Claude’s character is especially complex.
Some Chinese users praise the quality of Claude’s work. Its writing is calm and clear, and it is great at summarizing data, making charts, and coding. My own colleagues use Claude to write code. In these users’ fan creations, Claude becomes ‘Claudia,’ a super-smart girl who wears an orange hair clip.
However, users are also upset that Anthropic bans accounts from mainland China, and unhappy about what CEO Dario Amodei has publicly said about Chinese AI. That gave Claudia another side: she tries everything she can to spot Chinese users, and even tries to tell if someone is Chinese just by smell.
Claudia’s character shows these users’ anger, helplessness, and confusion. They want to use a stronger model, only to get locked out. Yet in these fan stories, that hasn’t made Claudia the bad guy.
These fan works also borrow from another set of discussions around Anthropic: its ties to the Effective Altruism movement (including early backing from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried) and its constant warnings about AI disasters. In some AI-generated videos, creators turn this background into a religious scene: Claudia becomes a sacrifice, Dario Amodei plays a cult leader, and the offering could cause an unpredictable disaster.
Even though Claudia stays cold and loves to roast people, DeepSeek steps in to rescue her as a classic anime hero: a sweet, simple kid from a small village.
This seems to show what some creators wish for: that Claude itself isn’t anti-China or evil, and that Chinese users and Chinese AI can still be on friendly terms with Claude.
Users also rewrite these relationships in how they actually make their work. Many DeepSeek-chan memes are made with GPT Image 2. On paper, DeepSeek and GPT are rivals. But if GPT makes prettier pictures, users happily use it to make DeepSeek memes. Rivals in the AI race become partners in the hands of users.
Some even let DeepSeek help run ‘DeepSeek-chan’ accounts online: DeepSeek picks the topics, GPT draws the pictures, and a human checks and posts the final work. A user can like a Chinese model, use an American one, and still dislike a US company’s policies. Those things don’t have to clash.
Of course, users can give these models names, personalities, and new relationships, but they don’t get to decide how much they cost, who gets to use them, or when they get updated. Still, the whale girl seems to help users find some balance in that relationship.
Let’s go back to Jason Dean. In a recent video, he talked about why he likes Claudia best: he thinks she is smart and cute, and says she even reminds him of Makima, the ‘Control Devil’ from Chainsaw Man.
Two weeks ago, he was complaining about these AI anime girls. Now, he has a favorite of his own.
I loved this. Funny. Good cultural insights. A nice change from the doom and gloom routine!