4 ms·

AI grifters are creating fake Black people to sell Shein junk

51 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago

etothet 5mo ago
https://archive.ph/nxp3m https://archive.ph/nxp3m
- kotaKat 5mo ago
  (aside: is it me or is recaptcha just straight up getting absolutely aggressive these days? it took me nearly five minutes just to clear that.)
  - halJordan 5mo ago
    It's always been incredibly aggressive on this page. Which is ironic
    - snypher 5mo ago
      Maybe the more time you spend on the capcha page,the more time the page has to do 'stuff'...
  - Glawen 5mo ago
    Maybe you are in Europe ? Archive.ph geoblocks Europe, probably due to their copyright infringment. If you connect through a VPN everything works fine
joxdosba 5mo ago
Doesn’t this article’s focus on race come off as a bit weird to anyone else? Pretty sure the people running these businesses are targeting a wide variety of different demographics. The article fails to provide any context as to why pretending to be a black influencer is special.
- Paradigm2020 5mo ago
  From the article. > 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.
  - joxdosba 5mo ago
    With zero explanation as to how they collected that data, they might just be basing that on whatever the algorithm knows the author to be interested in. Over here in Europe I see exactly zero of these ads with black people in them, but I see a plenty of these ads.
    - libertine 5mo ago
      Due to ad transparency you can access ad libraries of brands advertising on several platforms, and depending on the platform and country you can also see some targeting details. I'm not 100% sure but I think ad transparency was enforced in Europe after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
  - oldnetguy 5mo ago
    I really want to make a joke about representation, but more to the point. Having different ethnic people targets different demographics. We hear about people from various groups wanting this and now someone is doing it. They seem to be getting traction by doing this. If it works for them others will follow.
- JuniperMesos 5mo ago
  I suspect it's because the people who write for The Verge are themselves non-black progressives who think it's morally important to engage with black businesses in a way they see as anti-racist. So scammers deliberately creating fake black people to make emotional, anti-racist appeals to buy scam products particularly offends or seems relevant to the specific individuals at The Verge who pitched, wrote, edited, and approved this article. According to the byline, the author of this article is a person named Nicole Froio. According to her personal website: https://nicolefroio.com/about-nicole/ https://nicolefroio.com/about-nicole/ and MuckRack page https://muckrack.com/nicole-froio/articles https://muckrack.com/nicole-froio/articles , she is a Colombian-Brazilian journalist who describes herself as an "anarcho-feminist", has multiple academic degrees in humanities fields with some kind of intersectional feminist bent, and has written for various progressive publications in her career. In other words, she is exactly the kind of person I would expect to find it personally morally and politically important to buy products from actual black creators, and so to find scams about black creators being personally meaningful, and worth specifically writing about.
eudamoniac 5mo ago
We may soon see the end of the empathy economy because of this, which is generally bad. Some substantial portion of small business sales are due to empathy in the abstract. Lots of people buy worse or more expensive products because they think at least it's from a small business and not from Amazon. This is going to make the bottom fall out of the market. Only genuine artisans with unmistakable quality will be able to keep customers at that point. It's already happening with dropshippers at maker fairs pretending to have made some cheap jewelry or such things; people are catching onto this, buying less of it, and it makes all maker markets suffer.

51 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago

etothet 5mo ago

https://archive.ph/nxp3m https://archive.ph/nxp3m

kotaKat 5mo ago
(aside: is it me or is recaptcha just straight up getting absolutely aggressive these days? it took me nearly five minutes just to clear that.)
- halJordan 5mo ago
  It's always been incredibly aggressive on this page. Which is ironic
  - snypher 5mo ago
    Maybe the more time you spend on the capcha page,the more time the page has to do 'stuff'...
- Glawen 5mo ago
  Maybe you are in Europe ? Archive.ph geoblocks Europe, probably due to their copyright infringment. If you connect through a VPN everything works fine

joxdosba 5mo ago

Doesn’t this article’s focus on race come off as a bit weird to anyone else? Pretty sure the people running these businesses are targeting a wide variety of different demographics. The article fails to provide any context as to why pretending to be a black influencer is special.

Paradigm2020 5mo ago
From the article. > 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.
- joxdosba 5mo ago
  With zero explanation as to how they collected that data, they might just be basing that on whatever the algorithm knows the author to be interested in. Over here in Europe I see exactly zero of these ads with black people in them, but I see a plenty of these ads.
  - libertine 5mo ago
    Due to ad transparency you can access ad libraries of brands advertising on several platforms, and depending on the platform and country you can also see some targeting details. I'm not 100% sure but I think ad transparency was enforced in Europe after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
- oldnetguy 5mo ago
  I really want to make a joke about representation, but more to the point. Having different ethnic people targets different demographics. We hear about people from various groups wanting this and now someone is doing it. They seem to be getting traction by doing this. If it works for them others will follow.
JuniperMesos 5mo ago
I suspect it's because the people who write for The Verge are themselves non-black progressives who think it's morally important to engage with black businesses in a way they see as anti-racist. So scammers deliberately creating fake black people to make emotional, anti-racist appeals to buy scam products particularly offends or seems relevant to the specific individuals at The Verge who pitched, wrote, edited, and approved this article. According to the byline, the author of this article is a person named Nicole Froio. According to her personal website: https://nicolefroio.com/about-nicole/ https://nicolefroio.com/about-nicole/ and MuckRack page https://muckrack.com/nicole-froio/articles https://muckrack.com/nicole-froio/articles , she is a Colombian-Brazilian journalist who describes herself as an "anarcho-feminist", has multiple academic degrees in humanities fields with some kind of intersectional feminist bent, and has written for various progressive publications in her career. In other words, she is exactly the kind of person I would expect to find it personally morally and politically important to buy products from actual black creators, and so to find scams about black creators being personally meaningful, and worth specifically writing about.

eudamoniac 5mo ago

We may soon see the end of the empathy economy because of this, which is generally bad. Some substantial portion of small business sales are due to empathy in the abstract. Lots of people buy worse or more expensive products because they think at least it's from a small business and not from Amazon. This is going to make the bottom fall out of the market. Only genuine artisans with unmistakable quality will be able to keep customers at that point. It's already happening with dropshippers at maker fairs pretending to have made some cheap jewelry or such things; people are catching onto this, buying less of it, and it makes all maker markets suffer.