Deepfakes are wrecking influencers’ credibility, one fake ad at a time

Earlier this year, Emily Schuman, the creator of the lifestyle blog Cupcakes and Cashmere, saw a photo of herself she didn’t recognize on Instagram. 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.

The ad was based on a digitally altered version of a selfie Schuman had taken in her car and posted on Instagram years earlier. 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.

“It’s so violating,” she said. The videos and images look “just like me, but the upside down version”.

Neither Gala nor Meroda responded to requests for comment. 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. “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. Global consumers may have lost as much as $3.7bn 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.

Easy targets for deepfakes

Celebrities 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.

But big celebrities aren’t alone. 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. 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.

With AI, “impersonation is much easier and much more convincing … [so] scams can be operated at a much larger scale,” said Marwick. “It’s often really believable. And with every new frontier model, they get better and better.”

One reason for the rise of deepfakes may be a growing use of AI-generated marketing content in general. AI-generated or “virtual” influencers accounted for $1.37bn, or about 4% of all brand spending in 2026, according to research from marketing consultancy Digital Applied. Virtual influencers may not have the same authenticity as real people, but they are much cheaper, always available, and infinitely customizable, which makes them attractive for some brand campaigns.

While the ad industry has always blurred the line between real and fake with airbrushing, CGI and other digital editing tools, the rise of AI has allowed brands to generate content from nothing with minimal production costs. And for some brands, that means crossing the line into deepfakes.

Influencers are doing whatever they can to fight the issue. Molly Tranchin, a fashion influencer known as FashionVeggie with more than 500,000 followers on Instagram, recently filed a lawsuit against the underwear brand Eby. According to the lawsuit, Tranchin had a contract to create three marketing videos for Eby in exchange for a fee. Eby was entitled to one round of “reasonable edits” for Tranchin to revise. The lawsuit claims that instead of posting the videos Tranchin submitted – in which she posed “modestly covering her chest and breasts with her arms” – the brand instead posted a deepfake video of Tranchin in a different pose, “exposing her breasts and nipples through one of Eby’s sheer bras”.

Tranchin has since dropped the lawsuit over a lack of jurisdiction and plans to refile it in a different court, according to court documents filed last month.

Eby spokesperson Clara Spahr said the company couldn’t comment on the pending litigation but will address the claims through the legal process.

The fight for their likeness

Tranchin, whose lawsuit is ongoing, has the benefit of knowing exactly who to hold accountable for the deepfakes. Other creators are not as lucky.

When Schuman discovered the deepfaked ads using her likeness, she and her manager immediately reported them to Meta. She said many of her followers, who brought these ads to her attention, also reported them. But it took weeks of badgering before Meta removed the GLP-1 ad. The makeup ad still remains in circulation on Instagram, despite many attempts from Schuman to get it taken down.

Both Meta and TikTok explicitly prohibit using artificial intelligence or digital manipulation to replicate a person’s identity. But the reality is that these platforms’ personalization algorithms may inadvertently grease the wheels for these schemes.

Meta, for example, allows advertisers to use hyper-targeted audience slicing, meaning bad actors can quietly launch fraudulent ads, create new accounts if one gets flagged, and scale their reach rapidly. In response to complaints about rampant scams on its platforms, Meta introduced new tools this year, including stronger advertiser verification policies and an AI detection tool to prevent “celeb-bait”, or the impersonation of celebrities. But experts say these tools do not go far enough, and that the company lacks incentive to clean up its own ad ecosystem. Meta did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“The reality is that platforms make a lot of money off scams,” Marwick said.

Meta made about $16bn from ads promoting scams or banned goods, accounting for about 10% of its revenue in 2024, according to a 2025 investigation from Reuters. That investigation also quoted an internal presentation from Meta’s safety team, which estimated that its platforms were “involved in a third of all successful scams in the US”.

Not only do deepfakes hurt brand deals for individual influencers, but they also challenge the entire influencer marketing ecosystem. They disrupt the already delicate premise that a real person trusts a product or brand, and therefore their followers should do the same.

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. Besides reporting the offending posts and threatening legal action, influencers don’t have much recourse.

“That’s money and time lost,” Schuman said about hiring a lawyer. But the alternative is a hit to her reputation. “So it’s a lose-lose from all ways of looking at it.”