AI grifters are creating fake Black people to sell Shein junk
AI grifters are creating fake Black people to sell Shein junk
AI 骗子正在制造虚假的黑人形象来兜售 Shein 的廉价商品
Aliyah, a light-skinned Black woman dressed in country-western gear, is struggling to sell metal buckles she handmade on TikTok. In a video for the social media platform from March, she cries to the camera and pleads for views: “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. She wipes a tear off her cheek.
Aliyah 是一位穿着乡村西部风格服装的浅肤色黑人女性，她正在 TikTok 上努力推销自己手工制作的金属皮带扣。在今年 3 月发布的一段社交媒体视频中，她对着镜头哭泣并恳求关注。屏幕上的文字写道：“即使作为一名黑人女性，我依然更相信白人女性会停留 13 秒（观看此视频）来拯救我的皮带扣生意。”她一边说着，一边擦去了脸颊上的一滴泪水。
But Aliyah isn’t real, and neither are her supposedly handmade products — she’s one of many AI-generated influencers created to sell mass-produced products via dropshipping on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Identical belt buckles — sunflower design, detachable knife inlay, and all — are sold on the fast-fashion site Shein, and for a quarter of the price.
但 Aliyah 并不是真实存在的人，她所谓的“手工制品”也并非出自她手。她是众多由 AI 生成的网红之一，这些网红被创造出来，旨在通过 TikTok、Facebook 和 Instagram 上的代发货（dropshipping）模式兜售批量生产的商品。同样的皮带扣——包括向日葵图案、可拆卸刀具镶嵌等细节——在快时尚网站 Shein 上均有销售，且价格仅为这些视频中售价的四分之一。
There are some clues to spot to determine that this video is AI-generated. Aliyah’s voice is robotic and emotionless, which doesn’t match the crying face on the screen. In one clip, she is sewing a leather belt where there wouldn’t usually be sewing at all. When she wipes a tear off her face, the stream of liquid below where she wipes also disappears. And lastly, there are dozens of uncannily comparable videos, but with different AI-generated characters, circulating on TikTok. One, a profile for an account called “Aliyahsbuckles,” features an identical background, tabletop, and spool of twine.
通过一些线索可以判断这段视频是由 AI 生成的。Aliyah 的声音听起来机械且缺乏情感，与屏幕上哭泣的表情并不匹配。在一段视频中，她正在缝制一条皮带，但那个位置通常根本不需要缝纫。当她擦去脸上的泪水时，擦拭处下方的液体痕迹也随之消失了。最后，TikTok 上还流传着数十个极其相似的视频，只是其中的 AI 角色各不相同。例如，一个名为“Aliyahsbuckles”的账号，其背景、桌面和线轴与上述视频完全一致。
The Verge found dozens of accounts on TikTok with similar narratives and a variety of dropshipping products, including belt buckles, mugs shaped like cowboy boots, crochet bags, and cardigans. Some of these videos are labelled as AI-generated. Similar accounts are also active on Instagram and Facebook. Nearly all aspects of the accounts appear to be AI-generated — from the “person” in the video to automated responses to comments, which in some cases attempt to mimic African American vernacular — and experts warn scams like this are growing every day.
《The Verge》在 TikTok 上发现了数十个讲述类似故事并销售各种代发货产品的账号，商品包括皮带扣、牛仔靴形状的马克杯、钩针编织包和开衫等。其中一些视频被标注为 AI 生成。类似的账号在 Instagram 和 Facebook 上也十分活跃。这些账号的几乎所有方面看起来都是由 AI 生成的——从视频中的“人物”到对评论的自动回复（在某些情况下甚至试图模仿非裔美国人的口语），专家警告称，此类骗局正日益增多。
“It’s massive,” Jeremy Carrasco, a researcher of AI-generated media and director of Riddance.ai, an organization that focuses on AI video detection, told The Verge of AI-generated videos connected to e-commerce stores. “Most of them aren’t coordinated. Some of them are coordinated. A lot of the time they’ll run a single [AI-generated] actor, or a couple actors will run all sorts of shops,” he explained. Those AI-generated avatars pretend to make the items, go to fairs to display their products, and “respond” to comments through automation. “What we’re seeing right now are these retail scams where they’ll link to the Shopify websites.”
“规模非常庞大，”专注于 AI 视频检测的组织 Riddance.ai 的负责人、AI 生成媒体研究员 Jeremy Carrasco 在接受《The Verge》采访时谈到了这些与电商平台挂钩的 AI 视频。“它们大多不是协同运作的，但也有部分是有组织的。很多时候，他们会运营一个（AI 生成的）演员，或者由几个演员来经营各种各样的店铺，”他解释道。这些 AI 生成的虚拟形象假装在制作商品、去展会展示产品，并通过自动化程序“回复”评论。“我们现在看到的是这些零售骗局，它们会链接到 Shopify 网站。”
Carrasco estimates his research team is finding up to 100 accounts that attempt to sell products via AI-generated avatars every day. Most of the accounts found by The Verge were created in the last two months and contain videos about small businesses owned by marginalized individuals struggling to make a sale; these videos are incredibly similar, with only slight variations in their scripts. While we also found Native American, Hispanic, and white women characters, the most viewed and engaged-with AI-generated characters found by The Verge are Black women. Aliyah’s account alone has 40,000 followers.
Carrasco 估计，他的研究团队每天能发现多达 100 个试图通过 AI 虚拟形象销售产品的账号。《The Verge》发现的大多数账号都是在过去两个月内创建的，视频内容多为边缘群体经营的小企业在销售困境中挣扎；这些视频极其相似，脚本只有细微差别。虽然我们也发现了美洲原住民、西班牙裔和白人女性角色，但《The Verge》发现的观看量和互动量最高的 AI 角色依然是黑人女性。仅 Aliyah 一个账号就拥有 4 万名粉丝。
“What we’re seeing here is empathy bait,” said Carrasco. “If there is a popular dropship item that could be sold to some sort of niche community, they will find it and they will try [to use] some personality to do it.” Carrasco explains that these trends are usually random opportunities to make money. “It’s just an arbitrary opportunity, which is what a lot of AI content out there is — the platforms don’t really care and people don’t notice.”
“我们在这里看到的是‘同情心诱饵’，”Carrasco 说。“如果有一种流行的代发货商品可以卖给某个特定的小众群体，他们就会找到它，并试图利用某种‘人格’来推销。”Carrasco 解释说，这些趋势通常是随机的赚钱机会。“这只是一个随意的机会，这也是目前市面上许多 AI 内容的本质——平台并不真正关心，而人们也并未察觉。”
Aliyah’s most popular video, the one described in the introduction of this article, has 814,000 likes, 6.5 million views, and almost 30,000 comments. Some comments identify the content as AI-generated, but many express the desire to help Aliyah’s business, commenting on the video to increase her visibility on the platform.
Aliyah 最受欢迎的视频（即本文开头描述的那段）获得了 81.4 万个赞、650 万次观看和近 3 万条评论。虽然有些评论指出了该内容是由 AI 生成的，但许多人仍表达了帮助 Aliyah 生意的愿望，通过在视频下评论来提高她在平台上的曝光度。
India Cater-Campbell was one of those commenters, expressing a desire to buy Aliyah’s belt buckles. “I was trying to be supportive to an independent Black businesswoman,” said Cater-Campbell, an actual Black business owner working on opening a café in Seattle. “[I felt] solidarity as I am trying to start a business myself.”
India Cater-Campbell 就是其中一位评论者，她表达了购买 Aliyah 皮带扣的意愿。“我只是想支持一位独立的黑人女商人，”Cater-Campbell 说。她本人也是一位正在西雅图筹备咖啡馆的黑人企业主，“因为我自己也在创业，所以我（感到）一种团结。”
Despite a lack of studies on the latest gen AI video models, Carrasco estimates that these videos are “realistic enough to trick” most people. Users of short-form video content platforms have been trained to scroll mindlessly and not look further into the content they’re creating. Ironically, this is what might have saved Cater-Campbell from actually buying a belt buckle: She couldn’t immediately find a store link, so she scrolled away and promptly forgot about Aliyah.
尽管目前缺乏针对最新一代 AI 视频模型的研究，但 Carrasco 估计这些视频“足够逼真，足以欺骗”大多数人。短视频平台的用户已经被训练成无意识地刷视频，而不会深入探究内容的真实性。讽刺的是，这反而可能让 Cater-Campbell 免于真正购买皮带扣：因为她没能立即找到商店链接，于是她划走了视频，并很快忘记了 Aliyah。
But people are falling for these scams, and their prominence grows: Two weeks ago, Gizelle Bryant from The Real Housewives of Potomac admitted to buying two crocheted bags after seeing a video in which an AI-generated Black boy said he was being bullied by white boys for crocheting. “I was like, I want to help this little Black boy make his goal,” Bryant said on her podcast Reasonably Shady, adding that other celebrities had also been in the comment section. “How did I get tricked? Viola Davis was on there, too.”
但人们确实正在落入这些骗局，且其影响力日益增长：两周前，《波托马克的真实主妇》（The Real Housewives of Potomac）的 Gizelle Bryant 承认，她在看到一段视频后购买了两个钩针编织包。视频中，一个 AI 生成的黑人小男孩声称自己因为钩针编织而遭到白人男孩的欺凌。“当时我想，我想帮助这个黑人小男孩实现他的目标，”Bryant 在她的播客《Reasonably Shady》中说道，并补充说其他名人也出现在了评论区。“我怎么会被骗呢？连 Viola Davis 也在那儿（评论）。”