Actress Wu Yue Says an AI Deepfake Stole Her Face to Sell Skincare on Livestream

The Chinese actress Wu Yue woke up on Friday to a stranger selling skincare with her face. On the livestream, "she" recommended an IRY skincare set, with text overlays assuring viewers it was "Wu Yue recommends", "celebrity same style" and that a passerby would guess the seller was under 30. The account behind it, "Sister Hua's Skincare Diary," operated from Guangdong, and its clips carried one small print the scammers may have counted on nobody reading: a label reading "contains AI-generated content."

Wu Yue, a veteran film and television actress, went public the same morning with a post that was blunt even by the standards of celebrity complaints. "I woke up and who is using AI to wantonly grab people and do evil on their behalf?" she wrote, addressing the operator directly: "This 'Sister Hua' — how much money have you cheated people out of? Return every last cent! This is despicable!" Her post was liked more than 4,500 times within a day, and screenshots of the fake account spread alongside it, showing a shopfront of promotional thumbnails built entirely around her likeness.

The episode is a familiar scam wearing new clothes. Livestream commerce is one of China's biggest retail channels, and impersonation of celebrities to move merchandise long predates generative video — but face-swapping tools have collapsed the cost of building a convincing fake. What once required a lookalike now requires a clip of the target's face and a consumer-grade app, and the impersonator can keep streaming until someone with a lawyer notices.

What struck a chord in the discussion under her post is how little recourse exists even for the famous. "AI scams are hard to gather evidence for and hard to seek redress for — even celebrities are deeply victimized by them," one widely shared comment put it, "and ordinary people simply cannot tell what is real anymore." The commenter's conclusion — that the technology itself is neutral, but that a gray industry is running unchecked with it — captured the mood better than any official statement has. When officials debunked a fabricated video of a begging brown bear at Kanas earlier this month, the worry was the same: fabricated media that persuades people of something false. A fake storefront that sells them something is the commercial version of the same problem.

The platform-label detail may prove to be the story's most instructive part. The fake account was, technically, in compliance — the disclosure label was there, in small type, while the overlays promised buyers a celebrity endorsement. Disclosure without enforcement is camouflage.

Wu Yue's demand that the money be returned in full has so far been answered only by the account's silence. Whether the platform removes it, whether the operator is traced, and whether any of the buyers see refunds will say how much the "contains AI-generated content" label is actually worth.