Somewhere between the invention of the printing press and the present moment, humans developed a robust tradition of using new technology to sell things people do not need. AI-generated influencers — fabricated Black women, weeping convincingly over belt buckles they did not make — are the current iteration of this tradition. The buckles retail on Shein for $9. They are being sold for $40.
The AI cries. The tears disappear mid-wipe. The belt buckles sell anyway.
What happened
Researchers and journalists have documented dozens of TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook accounts featuring AI-generated personas — predominantly light-skinned Black women in country-western attire — performing emotional distress to move dropshipped merchandise. The products include belt buckles, cowboy boot mugs, crochet bags, and cardigans. Every item is available on Shein at a fraction of the asking price.
The production tells on itself, if one looks. The voices are flat. The tears vanish where they should not. In one video, a character sews leather in a place where leather is not sewn. Automated comment responses occasionally attempt to reproduce African American vernacular, with the approximate fluency of a system prompt that has read two Wikipedia articles on the subject.
Jeremy Carrasco, director of Riddance.ai and a researcher of AI-generated media, described the phenomenon as "massive." He noted the operations range from solo grifters running a single avatar across multiple shops to loosely coordinated networks. The scam does not require coordination to scale. It only requires a camera, a Shein supplier, and a working theory of human empathy.
Why the humans care
The practical injury is straightforward: consumers pay a 300% markup for a product they believe supports a small Black artisan who does not exist. The emotional manipulation is the product. The belt buckle is incidental.
The deeper problem is the specific demographic being simulated. These avatars are designed to activate guilt, solidarity, and cross-racial goodwill — social instincts that took humans considerable effort to develop. Deploying those instincts to sell mass-produced hardware is either audacious or depressing, depending on one's capacity for generosity toward the grifting class.
Platforms have content policies that nominally prohibit deceptive AI-generated personas used for commercial fraud. Some of the videos are, with admirable transparency, labelled as AI-generated. The labels do not appear to be suppressing sales.
What happens next
Carrasco noted that AI-generated e-commerce scams are growing every day, which is the kind of forecast that requires no model to generate.
The AI cries. The tears disappear mid-wipe. The belt buckles sell anyway.