Your Wife Won’t Recognise You. 

The New York Times found hundreds of A.I.-generated doctors, healers and wellness influencers on social media touting the health benefits of supplements to American consumers. 

Many of these hyperrealistic looking ads promise medical miracles, and appear to be targeting older women, while making misleading health claims for a profit.

“This is what we look like on Day 1 of taking beetroot every day. This is Day 50.” They look like the kind of wellness influencers you see every day on social media. “This is Day 77, girl.” 

But none of them are real. They are A.I.- generated and designed to sell health supplements on social media. 

The Times reviewed hundreds of these ads to understand how A.I. video tools are helping a loosely regulated industry target American consumers and profit off of disinformation about their health.  

“They’re targeting us people that have health issues.” Pamela Wundrow is 71. She’s a retired truck driver with a series of health issues related to autoimmune disease. “I’ve always had the joint problems and the inflammation and the fatigue, so I basically wanted something that was going to help me with all that.” 

After seeing Facebook ads touting the health effects of moringa, she placed an order for a popular online supplement brand called Rosabella. “They’re pretty good at advertising this stuff. I do foraging, so I’m always into the plant stuff.” After months of taking her daily dose, she found out some of her pills were contaminated. “It says urgent recall.” 

In February, the F.D.A. and C.D.C. announced that Rosabella’s moringa supplement was making people sick with salmonella. Wundrow says she didn’t experience any symptoms of salmonella, but says her health issues got worse while taking the supplement. 

“When you already have a health problem before this, and then you take this and then all of a sudden you got worse. Was this part of it? I don’t know. I can’t say, and I don’t know how they could prove it either.” 

Ambrosia Brands, the company behind Rosabella, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But over the past three years, the company has had hundreds of complaints with the Better Business Bureau. 

“In Chinese medicine, we have known exactly how to bring this down for generations.” I mean, I believe in Chinese medicine, and I can see how this would hook people because she looks real. I have seen others where you can tell it’s A.I. To me this does not look like an A.I.” 

“So how can we tell if these ads are A.I.-generated? From American flags to idyllic suburban backgrounds, the imagery is repeated over and over and is designed to make the ads seem familiar. 

Creators also go to great lengths to make their avatars look credible, presenting them as doctors or Eastern medical gurus with fake diplomas on the walls of their fake offices. In some cases, the ads make dangerous health claims like this one, claiming an herbal supplement helped treat kidney disease better than medication. 

“We gave 100 people with Stage 3 kidney disease one bottle of Sculptique and told them —” Ads like these would be illegal on U.S. television, but on the internet, they face little enforcement. 

Meanwhile, creators around the world are cashing in on A.I. avatars. “Share a link to an Amazon product and get paid commission.” “Women over 40 need to hear this.” “The people who figured this out are printing money behind the scenes.” 

In China, A.I. advertising has exploded, as companies seek a quick and easy way to reach the U.S. market. This Chinese agency has been using A.I. to sell brands on TikTok Shop for the past year. From supplements to toys to electronics, the ads are tailor-made to look American. “Watch and learn, bro.” 

With 40 employees and hundreds of accounts, the company says it produces around 1,200 A.I. videos like this per day, at a cost of about $10 each. “Best gift ever.” 

Vivi Yi declined to show us any supplement ads, saying it would violate her contract with the brands, but she did acknowledge that health products need to be handled with extra caution on TikTok. 

TikTok says it has been banning accounts that make misleading health claims, and Meta says it labels A.I.-generated content on Facebook and Instagram. But we shared several examples that were still live on these platforms, which the companies later removed. 

For now, the technology is moving faster than anyone can keep up with. Many of these online-only brands are operated by anonymous L.L.C.s. And there is no federal law limiting the use of synthetic people in advertising. 

Meanwhile, these fake wellness influencers are multiplying across our social feeds, taking advantage of people who can no longer tell what’s real. 

“You want real truth in advertising. You don’t want this fake person. Anybody can be scammed.”