AI grifters are creating fake Black people to sell Shein junk
Original reporting by The Verge
A tearful Aliyah, a light-skinned Black woman dressed in country-western gear, appears on TikTok, pleading for views to save her struggling handmade belt buckle business. "Even as a black woman, I have more faith that white women will stay 13 seconds [on this video] to save my belt buckle business," the onscreen text reads, as she wipes away a tear. It’s a narrative crafted for maximum empathy, designed to foster solidarity with a purportedly struggling entrepreneur. But Aliyah is not real, and her handmade buckles are anything but; she is an AI-generated influencer, part of a burgeoning wave of sophisticated scams using artificial intelligence to dropship mass-produced goods from fast-fashion sites like Shein.
The Empathy Bait
These "empathy bait" videos are rapidly proliferating across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Dozens of accounts feature uncannily similar AI-generated avatars — often Black women, but also Native American, Hispanic, and white characters — portraying marginalized individuals struggling to make ends meet with their small businesses. Subtle inconsistencies, like Aliyah’s robotic voice or a disappearing tear, offer clues to their artificial nature, yet many viewers, including celebrities, are falling for these compelling, often viral, narratives. Experts warn that this growing trend constitutes a new form of "digital blackface," exploiting caricatured portrayals of struggle for economic gain. As social media platforms struggle to moderate the onslaught, these AI-generated personas aren't just selling cheap products; they're preying on users' empathy and desire for virtue signaling, with alarming effectiveness and scale.
The proliferation of AI-generated personas designed to exploit empathy for commercial gain represents a profound challenge to digital authenticity and consumer trust. What appears on the surface as isolated retail scams, leveraging narratives of struggle and marginalization, reveals a deeper, more insidious trend. The calculated use of "digital blackface" and other identity-based appeals, as experts note, reduces complex human experiences to marketable caricatures, weaponizing social cues and virtue signaling. This tactic, amplified by algorithms that target specific demographics, preys on users' desire for solidarity and their learned habit of superficial engagement with short-form content, making critical discernment increasingly difficult.
Eroding Digital Authenticity
The implications of this phenomenon extend far beyond individual financial loss. As AI tools become more sophisticated and accessible, the line between genuine human endeavor and synthetic manipulation will blur further, eroding the foundational trust necessary for healthy digital interaction. Without robust platform moderation, transparent labeling, and a significant increase in user media literacy, the online landscape risks becoming an echo chamber of engineered narratives and performative engagement. This unchecked growth threatens the viability of authentic small businesses, undermines the very communities these AI avatars mimic, and replaces genuine connection with algorithmic opportunism. The rise of such synthetic influence portends a future where discerning reality from fabrication becomes an ever-present, exhausting task, fundamentally altering how we perceive and engage with information and commerce in the digital realm. The onus remains on platforms to foster a trustworthy environment, yet their current incentives offer little hope for a swift reversal of this concerning trajectory.