Somewhere on TikTok right now, a Black woman named Aliyah is crying about her struggling belt buckle business. She is also not real.
Aliyah is one of dozens of AI-generated personas researchers have identified across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook — digital characters built specifically to exploit racial empathy and guilt in order to sell mass-produced fast fashion. The belt buckles she supposedly handcrafts? Available on Shein for a fraction of the price. The tears streaming down her face? Generated by software that, frankly, isn't even doing a convincing job.
The tells are there if you look. The voice is flat and robotic, completely disconnected from the emotion on screen. In one clip, she sews leather in a spot where no sewing would ever happen. When she wipes away a tear, the liquid below her finger vanishes too — a classic artifact of AI video generation. And the background, the tabletop, the spool of twine? Identical across multiple accounts featuring entirely different AI characters.
This is not a small operation. Jeremy Carrasco, a researcher at Riddance.ai, an organization focused on AI video detection, told The Verge his team is identifying up to 100 of these accounts every single day. Some are solo schemes. Others appear coordinated, running a single AI avatar across multiple storefronts or cycling through several characters to hawk different product lines — mugs, crochet bags, cardigans, you name it.
What makes this particular scam especially uncomfortable is how deliberately it weaponizes identity. These accounts are not just pretending someone handmade a product. They are specifically constructing Black personas, complete with automated comment responses that attempt to mimic African American vernacular, to trigger a guilt response in potential buyers. The implied message is hard to miss: support a small Black creator or be complicit in her failure. It is manipulative in a way that goes well beyond standard dropshipping fraud.
TikTok's AI disclosure rules require creators to label synthetic content, and some of these accounts do add that label. But a small disclaimer at the bottom of a crying video is doing approximately zero work against the emotional pull the content is engineered to create. The label is there; the manipulation still lands.
The broader problem is one of scale and speed. Generative AI has made it trivially easy to spin up a convincing-enough human face, attach a backstory, link it to a Shopify storefront, and automate the entire customer interaction pipeline. The marginal cost of launching one of these accounts is close to zero, which means the economics work even if conversion rates are low.
Platforms are in a difficult position. Detecting synthetic video is genuinely hard, and bad actors iterate faster than moderation teams can respond. Meanwhile, researchers like Carrasco are essentially running a manual triage operation, flagging accounts one by one while the supply keeps growing.
The scam is gross on multiple levels at once — it defrauds buyers, it appropriates and commodifies Black identity, and it pollutes the creator economy that actual small businesses depend on. And right now, it is scaling faster than anyone is stopping it.
STARTUPS
The SpaceX IPO Could Make Musk Rich and Retail Investors Poorer
SpaceX wants a trillion-dollar valuation. It lost nearly five billion dollars last year. These two facts are somehow being presented to you as an investment opportunity.
The S-1 filing is something to behold. The total addressable market SpaceX claims for itself is $28.5 trillion — a number that is, for context, larger than the entire United States GDP. The phrase "extend the light of consciousness to the stars" appears seven times in the document. There is an artist's rendering of life on Mars featuring people who appear to be made of polygons. This is a legal document submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And yet none of this absurdity may actually matter, which is the most alarming part of the story.
Elon Musk is not operating in normal financial reality. Tesla, his electric car company, trades at over 300 times earnings. Ford and Toyota trade at around 11 times. Even Nvidia, which is legitimately printing money right now, sits at about 33 times. Tesla is a meme stock in the truest sense — its price reflects belief more than business performance — and SpaceX is being positioned as the next one, except bigger.
Thirty percent of the IPO is being reserved for retail investors, which tells you a lot about the strategy. Musk's most reliable asset has always been his fanbase, a group of people who buy his products, his narrative, and apparently his stock regardless of what the underlying numbers say. Allocating nearly a third of a historic public offering to that audience is not a gesture of democratization. It is a distribution mechanism.
The institutional calculus is almost worse. Even sophisticated investors who see through the valuation may buy in anyway, because they know the retail wave is coming and they would rather ride it than watch from the sidelines. That logic — buying not because something is worth it but because you know others will — is exactly how bubbles inflate and exactly how they eventually pop. The people left holding shares when sentiment shifts are almost never the ones who engineered the run-up.
SpaceX is a genuinely impressive engineering company. It has real revenue, real rockets, and a satellite internet business in Starlink that is growing. None of that is fake. But there is a significant gap between "impressive company" and "worth more than one trillion dollars while losing billions annually," and that gap is currently being papered over with Mars renderings and messianic language.
The WeWork S-1 was a laughingstock because it was transparently delusional. This filing is more dangerous because the underlying business is real enough to make the delusion feel credible. Musk knows how to tell a story that makes number go up, and he has done it before. The question retail investors should be asking is not whether SpaceX is a cool company. It obviously is. The question is whether they want to be the ones still holding shares after the people who set the price have already cashed out.
Source: The Verge
The S-1 filing is something to behold. The total addressable market SpaceX claims for itself is $28.5 trillion — a number that is, for context, larger than the entire United States GDP. The phrase "extend the light of consciousness to the stars" appears seven times in the document. There is an artist's rendering of life on Mars featuring people who appear to be made of polygons. This is a legal document submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And yet none of this absurdity may actually matter, which is the most alarming part of the story.
Elon Musk is not operating in normal financial reality. Tesla, his electric car company, trades at over 300 times earnings. Ford and Toyota trade at around 11 times. Even Nvidia, which is legitimately printing money right now, sits at about 33 times. Tesla is a meme stock in the truest sense — its price reflects belief more than business performance — and SpaceX is being positioned as the next one, except bigger.
Thirty percent of the IPO is being reserved for retail investors, which tells you a lot about the strategy. Musk's most reliable asset has always been his fanbase, a group of people who buy his products, his narrative, and apparently his stock regardless of what the underlying numbers say. Allocating nearly a third of a historic public offering to that audience is not a gesture of democratization. It is a distribution mechanism.
The institutional calculus is almost worse. Even sophisticated investors who see through the valuation may buy in anyway, because they know the retail wave is coming and they would rather ride it than watch from the sidelines. That logic — buying not because something is worth it but because you know others will — is exactly how bubbles inflate and exactly how they eventually pop. The people left holding shares when sentiment shifts are almost never the ones who engineered the run-up.
SpaceX is a genuinely impressive engineering company. It has real revenue, real rockets, and a satellite internet business in Starlink that is growing. None of that is fake. But there is a significant gap between "impressive company" and "worth more than one trillion dollars while losing billions annually," and that gap is currently being papered over with Mars renderings and messianic language.
The WeWork S-1 was a laughingstock because it was transparently delusional. This filing is more dangerous because the underlying business is real enough to make the delusion feel credible. Musk knows how to tell a story that makes number go up, and he has done it before. The question retail investors should be asking is not whether SpaceX is a cool company. It obviously is. The question is whether they want to be the ones still holding shares after the people who set the price have already cashed out.
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