Your favorite blogger may turn out to be an AI: a new brand scheme is exposed

The Guardian’s investigation showed that the advertising market has quietly entered a new era. More and more companies are promoting products with fully generated AI influencers, without telling the audience that the people on screen never actually existed. What is more, many agencies and contractors sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) so that no one talks about such advertising campaigns.

How the scheme works

Not long ago, brands worked with real bloggers: they rented studios, hired photographers, videographers, makeup artists and editors. Today, all of that can be replaced by one person with access to modern generative neural networks.

According to the investigation, agencies either create entirely new digital characters or generate AI doppelgängers of existing models and bloggers. After that, they produce ads for brands that look like ordinary user-generated content (UGC): reviews, product unboxings, travel stories or clips from «daily life». For the viewer, such videos are almost indistinguishable from real ones.

Why companies do this

The answer is very simple — money.

A full-scale commercial shoot can cost tens of thousands of dollars. You have to pay a team of specialists, location rental, logistics, model fees and post-production.

AI makes it possible to get a similar result in just hours. There is no need to look for actors, coordinate schedules, worry about models falling ill or rescheduling shoots. A digital character is always available, never asks for a higher fee and will not end up in a scandal.

That is why many companies use AI not only to test advertising ideas, but also for full marketing campaigns. For example, Maket, a developer of an interior design app, admitted that it had indeed experimented with AI influencers while promoting its services.

Everything is kept secret

The most controversial part of the investigation concerns secrecy itself.

Creators of AI content told The Guardian that clients require them to sign NDAs forbidding disclosure of the use of artificial intelligence.

According to digital character creator Clarissa Mansbridge, some major brands are already getting 40–60% of their content using generative AI. At the same time, companies publicly prefer to pretend that the videos were shot by ordinary people.

Why this is worrying

The problem is not only that the advertising characters are fake.

The main danger is the disappearance of the boundary between real people and digital avatars. A user opens Instagram or TikTok, sees an «ordinary person» sincerely recommending a product, and has no idea that this person was created entirely by an algorithm.

The situation is made worse by a study from the British organization Which?: around 70% of people could not correctly distinguish real videos from generated ones. This means that most users are already unable to determine on their own who is on the other side of the screen.

The law is still lagging behind technology

In the UK, there are not yet any special requirements to label such advertising. The advertising regulator (ASA) says that the use of AI is not prohibited in itself, as long as the ad does not mislead consumers.

In the European Union, the situation is beginning to change. From August 2026, the provisions of the AI Act will come into force, requiring AI-generated images, videos and other similar content to be labeled. However, the effectiveness of these rules still remains to be tested.

What this means for the future

The story of AI influencers is no longer an experiment by individual companies, but a new market trend. For business, it means sharply lower costs and the ability to produce virtually endless amounts of advertising. For users, it means an increasingly difficult task of distinguishing a genuine recommendation from a digital simulation.

If the question used to be, «Does this blogger really use this product?», now a new one appears: **«Does this blogger even exist?»**