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My rental property is paid off, but I need cash. Is this a bad time to take out a $50,000 HELOC?. Skip to main contentSkip to navigation ‘It’s so violating. [They look] just like me, but the upside-down version. ’ Illustration: Guardian Design/TiktokView image in fullscreen‘It’s so violating. [They look] just like me, but the upside-down version. ’ Illustration: Guardian Design/TiktokDeepfakes are wrecking influencers’ credibility, one fake ad at a timeInfluencers aren’t just battling competitors for brand deals.
What happened
They’re now battling AI versions of themselvesEarlier this year, Emily Schuman, the creator of the lifestyle blog Cupcakes and Cashmere, saw a photo of herself she didn’t recognize on Instagram. The ad was based on a digitally altered version of a selfie Schuman had taken in her car and posted on Instagram years earlier. “If their brand takes a hit, so does everything in their business life. ”On social media, impersonation schemes run a large spectrum, from deepfaked Elon Musk promoting a fraudulent cryptocurrency, to brands quietly scraping an influencer’s image to manufacture ads.
While the financial impact of these impersonation schemes is hard to pinpoint, creators say that deepfakes dilute their value, cost them the trust of their followers, and can be time-consuming to fight: even when one deepfake post is reported and removed, another one pops up in its place. The makeup ad still remains in circulation on Instagram, despite many attempts from Schuman to get it taken down. Schuman said she is deciding whether or not she needs to retain legal counsel to help her fight off the deepfakes as they keep popping up.
“That’s money and time lost,” Schuman said about hiring a lawyer.
The wider picture
The Federal Reserve announced a quarter-percentage-point interest-rate hike Wednesday, to a range of 3. 75%-4. 0%. In a sponsored ad, Schuman, who has more than 500,000 Instagram followers, is holding up a vial of GLP-1 drugs, advertising the telehealth company Gala. There was just one problem: Schuman had never heard of Gala and had nothing to do with the ad. Once her followers got wind, they flooded her inbox with questions about the sponsorship as it didn’t seem consistent with Schuman’s personal brand.
Soon after, Schuman discovered this was just the beginning. There was also an Instagram post where an AI version of her with darker hair appears to apply foundation to promote a makeup brand called Meroda Cosmetics, and TikTok posts with generated images of her promoting the blood testing company Superpower. The videos and images look “just like me, but the upside down version”. Neither Gala nor Meroda responded to requests for comment.
What has been reported
Superpower CEO Max Marchione said the TikTok post wasn’t a real ad, but instead came from a scammer his company later reported. “Whilst scamming isn’t new, AI has made this much worse,” he said. As generative AI makes it easier to create text, code and media, it has also supercharged the creation of deepfakes, the synthetic photos and videos that can be nearly indistinguishable from reality. Influencers are some of the easiest people to impersonate due to the sheer amount of videos and images AI can learn from.
The vulnerability represents a new workplace threat: influencers aren’t just competing for brand deals with other creators, but also fighting to preserve the credibility of their own likeness – the very asset that generates their income. “Their brand is their business,” said Alice Marwick, the director of research at the Data & Society Research Institute, who published a recent paper on the rise of AI impersonation scams. 7bn due to deepfake scams in 2026, according to an investigation from the VPN-maker Surfshark’s research team.
The investigation found that social media impersonations on social media accounted for about half of all losses.
What happens next
Easy targets for deepfakesCelebrities and influencers are often the easiest to impersonate because they “have hundreds of hours of footage and thousands of pictures of them online. So you can feed that into a model and produce a fairly convincing deepfake,” said Marwick. Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tom Hanks have all been deepfaked by AI to promote various products online. On Instagram, beauty influencer Arielle Lorre was deepfaked to promote a skincare brand.
Fashion creator Jessi Caparella discovered altered images of herself on Pinterest redirecting traffic to affiliate clothing links. And deepfaked videos of OnlyFans creator Elaina St James were used to trick fans into sending money to fraudulent accounts. With AI, “impersonation is much easier and much more convincing … [so] scams can be operated at a much larger scale,” said Marwick.