If you use TikTok or any other app designed to rot your brain, chances are you’ve encountered AI-generated ads for somehow even faker-seeming products.

But the popular short-form video platform in particular is pushing a specific style of these ads that aim to be nefariously familiar: a person looking into the camera and making a direct pitch for some type of scammy-feeling product. Of course, this “person” is actually one of over a dozen AI “digital avatars” that TikTok offers to advertisers, which can be made to say whatever a client wants, so long as it adheres to the platform’s questionably enforced guidelines.

52-year-old Scott Jacqmein is one of the actors behind these AI digital avatars. And though his AI-puppetted mug appears in ads all over the platform, it turns out that selling your soul to a generative model used by a company that makes $10 billion in US ad revenue per year doesn’t really pay. Jacqmein’s total compensation for completely surrendering his likeness to the whims of advertisers he’ll never even meet, shilling products he’s never actually tried? $750 and zero royalties, he revealed in a new interview with the New York Times.

One ad is for a horoscope app, with his avatar standing in front of a background showing the “birthdays of witches” (which also appears to be AI-generated.) Another ad recommends cancelling your home insurance and switching to a product called “Safeu.” And another ad is in Spanish, which Jacqmein does not speak.

Jacqmein, who was not represented by an agent at the time when he worked with TikTok, regrets the decision, and said he would’ve negotiated for higher pay and stricter limits on what his likeness could be used for.

“The technology is evolving faster than the contracts, and they are poaching eager new actors who don’t have representation into their web of avatars,” Jacqmein told the NYT. He explained that he had recently pivoted to acting and believed that working with a big company like TikTok would be a good start.

“I’m definitely not anti-AI, and I’m not anti-TikTok,” he added. But “you really don’t know the ramifications of this.”

AI has made rapid inroads into the acting industry over the past few years, preying on non-union actors who don’t have the protections won by Hollywood actors in a 2023 strike. Tech companies offer easy money to these actors desperate for work. Generally, the actors are simply asked to read lines in front of a greenscreen. It’s an exploitative approach that makes a potent combination with the already sleazy world of online ads. One actor who licensed their likeness to an AI company called Synthesia was shocked to discover their face being used to back a foreign coup.

Based on other actors the NYT spoke to, Jacqmein is not alone in feeling robbed, considering the wide spread of what their faces and voices are being put to: two who also joined TikTok’s program were paid just $500 to $1,000 for their work. 

That’s far below the typical rate for commercial actors. Rafal Villegas at the Dallas-based talent agency told the NYT that non-represented actors can make between $300 to $1,000 per commercial, and even $2,500 for represented actors on nonunion jobs. Note that’s per commercial; the AI actors only received a small one-time payment for a potentially limitless number of ads. And it’s even dwarfed by what actors have received working with other AI companies: the actor who said his face was used in an ad backing a foreign coup said he was paid $5,240, for example. TikTok is being particularly miserly.

That kind of savings for advertisers, though, has investors chomping at the bit.

“Every advertiser would like to save money if they can save money,” venture capitalist and former TV network executive Joe Marchese told the NYT, predicting that digital avatars could be “seismic for advertising.”

More on AI: Subscribers to Fashion Magazine Vogue Disgusted When They Realize Where Its New Two-Page “Photos” Really Came From

The post Man Sells His Likeness So an AI Version of Him Can Shill Garbage on TikTok appeared first on Futurism.

Origianl Creator:Frank Landymore
Original Link: https://futurism.com/man-sells-ai-version-ads-tiktok
Originally Posted: Tue, 19 Aug 2025 22:43:07 +0000