YouTube is running hundreds of ads featuring deepfaked celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone hawking supplements that promise to help men with erectile dysfunction.
The ads, which were discovered by Alexios Mantzarlis in the Faked Up newsletter, have been running since at least November 12 and have around 300 variations according to Google’s Ad Transparency Center. All the ads use existing videos that are modified with an AI-generated voice and lip synced to match what the AI-generated voice is saying. Many of the ads feature non-celebrity women who talk about how their “husbands went wild” after “trying a secret simple mix” to treat their erectile dysfunction, but some of the ads feature deepfakes of celebrities including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Mike Tyson, and Terry Crews.