A light-skinned Black woman named Aliyah is dressed in country-western gear, crying to the camera about how white women might be more likely to buy her handmade belt buckles. Her video has 814,000 likes and almost 30,000 comments from people wanting to support what they believe is a struggling Black-owned small business. There's just one problem: Aliyah doesn't exist, neither does her "handmade" product, and identical belt buckles are being sold on Shein for a quarter of the price. Welcome to the latest frontier of AI grift — digital blackface deployed at scale to move fast-fashion trash through TikTok Shop.

The Empathy-Bait Machine

The Verge uncovered dozens of accounts across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook using AI-generated personas to sell dropshipped products. These aren't sophisticated operations — they're template-driven scams exploiting genuine for marginalized entrepreneurs. Jeremy Carrasco, a researcher at Riddance.ai who tracks AI-generated media, estimates his team is finding up to 100 new accounts attempting to sell products via fake avatars every single day. "Most of them aren't coordinated," he explained. "A lot of the time they'll run a single [AI-generated] actor, or a couple actors will run all sorts of shops." The accounts link to Shopify stores selling mass-produced goods while the AI avatars pretend to craft items by hand and respond to comments with automated responses — sometimes attempting to mimic African American vernacular.

Digital Blackface in Your Feed

Communications researcher Cienna Davis at the University of Pennsylvania calls it what it is: digital blackface. "It's rooted in blackface minstrelsy, which is tied to the legacy of slavery," she explained. The AI-generated avatars mimic recognizable narratives of Black struggle — struggling small business owners fighting against systemic barriers — not to tell authentic stories but to extract money from viewers who want to do right by marginalized communities. Tempest M. Henning, assistant professor of philosophy at Fisk University, notes that the names are "coded Black" like Aliyah or Amaya, but there's nothing else signaling authentic Blackness beyond the avatar itself. "The replication of content across racial identities results in the flattening of those identities," she said.

The Tools Are Child's Play

Here's where it gets really concerning for anyone paying attention to AI safety: creating these scams doesn't require technical expertise. The Verge found YouTube channels and forums dedicated to tutorials on building AI-generated commercial content without product samples, influencer fees, or original scripts. The playbook is brutally simple — use ChatGPT or Gemini to extract and copy scripts from viral videos by real influencers, then generate photos of fake people and backgrounds based on those same influencers. Import everything into apps like Kling 2.0, Seedance 2.0, Midjourney, or Maxfusion to create video clips. With some AI video models, users can fully import a real influencer's video and replace them with an AI character — effectively stealing the original creator's work while pushing counterfeit products.

Real People, Real Money Lost

"I was trying to be supportive to an independent Black businesswoman," said India Cater-Campbell, a Black business owner in Seattle who commented on one of Aliyah's videos. She couldn't find a store link and scrolled away before purchasing — but not everyone is so lucky. Gizelle Bryant from The Real Housewives of Potomac admitted on her podcast Reasonably Shady that she bought two crocheted bags after seeing an AI-generated Black boy claim he was being bullied for his crafting hobby. "How did I get tricked? Viola Davis was on there, too," Bryant said, noting other celebrities had fallen for the same grift.

Platform Failure

The technical tells are visible if you know what to look for: AI video generators like OpenAI's recently discontinued Sora 2 can't create clips longer than 15 seconds, so characters never appear onscreen for long. Emotions don't match voices — Aliyah cries while her robotic voice carries no emotion at all. When she wipes a tear, the liquid below disappears inconsistently. But recognizing these artifacts requires AI media literacy that simply isn't widely available. "People who aren't trained in critical media literacy are just going to take it in unquestionably," Davis said. Platforms currently fail to moderate or label this content, despite clear reporting pathways for AI misuse being technically feasible.

Key Takeaways

  • Up to 100 new AI-generated dropshipping accounts every day, using fake personas of marginalized business owners
  • Identical products sold by "handmade" AI avatars are available cheaper on Shein — the buckles Aliyah hawks for $40 appear on the fast-fashion site for a fraction of that price
  • Tutorials exist showing non-technical users how to clone real influencer videos and replace creators with AI avatars in minutes
  • Celebrity victims like Gizelle Bryant demonstrate these scams reach well beyond naive users into sophisticated media consumers