How Chinese AI Found Its Persona: DeepSeek's Fan-Made Whale Girl and the Shift to Humanized AI Branding

DeepSeek's fan-created anime mascot "Whale Girl," nicknamed "Big Fat Blue Fish," went viral on Bilibili after creator ZipZipPipe adapted an earlier character using GPT Image 2, with the surge peaking around the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash release. The character, never officially endorsed by DeepSeek, reflects a broader shift: Chinese AI labs moved from English acronyms like ERNIE and GLM to Chinese names such as Wenxin and Qianwen, then to relatable personas like ByteDance's Doubao.