Can race, guilt, and empathy get you to pay $40 for this $9 belt buckle on TikTok?
No paywall: https://archive.is/nxp3m (or use noscript)
They’re doing a/b tests on the headline.
Sometimes the article is “AI avatars in digital blackface want to sell you this belt buckle”, sometimes is “AI grifters are creating fake Black people to sell Shein junk”
Even in the article they talk about it going further than fake black businesses. It’s really just a new form of deceitful advertising. You’ve already got businesses using black actors and supposedly AA vernacular to sell food or prodcuts or even those horrible betting platforms
What’s funny about the whole thing is, for most regular popular advertising for larger companies, the ads wouldn’t look anything like these. Even if it had a black person, a poc, a white person, or a mix, the tone would be WAY different for those ads. It’s a super conscious exploitative choice.