Influencers aren’t just battling competitors for brand deals. They’re now battling AI versions of themselves

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.

Tech workers are increasingly unionizing, trading Silicon Valley’s myth of exceptionalism for collective bargaining to contest the corporate deployment of artificial intelligence

For decades, the technology industry was a fortress that labor unions couldn’t breach. Tech workers already had cushy compensation packages, dream benefits like unlimited vacation and free lunch, and a flat corporate hierarchy that made engineers feel as powerful as their bosses, all of whom dressed down in sneakers and hoodies. So why unionize?

Now, that fortress is cracking from the inside. Unions have become increasingly popular for tech employees. After months of mass layoffs tied to artificial intelligence and mounting anxieties about how it’s being deployed, some tech workers say they’ve been saddled with higher workloads while facing the threat of job loss caused by the very products they’re building. Workers from Google DeepMind and Meta in the UK are also objecting to how their companies’ AI products are being used, such as for military purposes or to monitor employee productivity. Those same workers are now attempting to unionize.