A Creator’s Likeness Appears to Have Been Stolen to Make AI-Generated Ads for a Skin-Care Brand
Plus: How many ribs would you break for a smaller waist?
Our AI-fueled hellscape keeps rolling this week! On Wednesday, Arielle Lorre—a lifestyle content creator and host of the podcast Well with Arielle Lorre—shared a video that seemed to show her endorsing Skaind, a skin-care brand I have never heard of that sells sheet masks and doesn’t have an About Us page on its website, during a podcast interview with Rich Roll. Except, Lorre said, that podcast interview never happened and she believes the company recreated her likeness using AI technology.
If you are someone who is familiar with the signs that something was made with AI, you might have clocked this right away. While the sentences Lorre and Roll are saying are technically grammatically correct, their speech pattern is stilted and the sentences sound like something a middle schooler would write for extra credit. (“Ok, tell us, what’s your secret?” “Roll” asks. “OK, but don’t go telling everyone alright? This is my best kept secret,” says “Lorre.”) Their mouths are moving, but otherwise their faces stay eerily still—something that spurred commenters to ask, as Lorre put it, “what the eff did she do to her face?”
But most people are not (yet!) on constant high alert for AI-generated videos, especially when you’re scrolling quickly through your Instagram or TikTok feed—and less scrupulous people and companies seem eager to take advantage of this. 404 Media has done great reporting on the growing phenomenon of AI-generated videos that use copyrighted content from real influencers without their permission (this example of accounts that are stealing that content and then using deepfake technology to edit it to make it look like the creator has Down syndrome before selling that altered content on OnlyFans is, I’d say, particularly disturbing). Not even Gwyneth Paltrow is safe.
Lorre said her attorney reached out to Skaind with a cease and desist, and the company apologized, saying that “At no time was it our intention to use your image or voice without authorization. Our marketing team accessed this content through an artificial intelligence platform without being aware that it was a recognized person or with image rights.” Lorre reported the video to Meta and received a notification that said the video did not go against their community standards. As of Thursday, the @skaind.official Instagram page no longer seems to exist.
Obviously this sucks for Lorre and anyone else who makes a living by putting their face and voice online. Some of the creators 404 Media spoke to said they noticed a dip in engagement after their content started being used elsewhere without their permission. It sucks for anyone who is trying to make legit content and now will have to deal with an understandable widespread paranoia that spurs viewers and readers to throw around AI allegations. The “em dashes are a sign of AI” discourse nearly took me out!!
It also, I would say, sucks for humanity more widely. I do genuinely fear we are moving into a post-fact era [Editor’s note: I’d say we’ve already moved in, transferred the utilities, and hung the drapes.] where it becomes so arduous to determine what is genuine and what is manipulated (with the help of technology or not; there are plenty of humans who have no problem knowingly spewing falsehoods for the sake of views and clicks) that your average person will just give up and choose to believe what sounds closest to the “truth” they already hold.
A Not-So-Gentle Ribbing
Jolene Edgar is the queen of digging up under-the-radar plastic surgery trends that deserve to be very much in the spotlight. This week, she published a story on Allure about rib remodeling. “In select cities across the country, some plastic surgeons are in fact promoting and performing rib removal and, more commonly, rib remodeling (also called rib reshaping, rib repositioning, and rib sculpting) to meet the unwavering demand for hourglass proportions,” she writes. As Edgar reports, ribs do, tragically, prevent many of us from having a perfectly flat stomach. This surgery gets rid of that pesky problem.
Chew on This
There’s been a rise in videos of influencers whipping up homemade gelatin gummies in their kitchens and claiming they’re the secret to perfect skin. But (surprise?) the science is a bit more wobbly than these creators would have you believe. Like I said, people are perfectly capable of coming up with false advertising without the help of bots.
The Breast News
Allure’s senior news editor Nicola Dall’Asen, you might remember from a previous edition of The Beauty Chat, recently got a breast augmentation to even hers, which had a two cup size difference before the surgery, out. This week, she published an in-depth recap of exactly what the experience was like, including the other options she was given but passed on and how long it’ll take to recover.
Feeling the Pinch
As promised last week, here is Allure’s reporting so far on how tariffs will likely affect the price of Botox and other injectables—as long as, you know, Trump actually goes through with these tariffs he’s been so jazzed about. In interesting timing, Aimee Lou Wood is the latest public figure to be vehemently anti-Botox.
In Other News
Kirbie Johnson continued her reporting into the Thirteen Lune and Nyakio Grieco lawsuit. The “first college degree specifically for beauty professionals.” Visible body hair is uncool again. A new era of men’s makeup. And finally: Rare Beauty joined Substack.
If you buy one thing this week, make it…
MAC Lipglass Air Non-Sticky Gloss
Our trend vertical has me nostalgic this week, reporting that bellybutton rings (which I never got the first time around but am seriously considering at the ripe old age of 35) and Y2K-inspired nail trends are both making a comeback. Perhaps that’s why I’ve also been drawn to MAC’s new version of its 1990s/2000s smash hit Lipglass. This iteration, called the Lipglass Air, lives up to the "non-sticky" claims better than any other lip gloss I've tried in recent memory. It's so lightweight that it feels closer to an oil, but the color actually sticks around for more than an hour. All of that plus the fact that Casual, a "deep dirty peach," is pretty close to my natural lip shade means this has officially become the lip product I reach for most often out of the hundreds in my stash.
