The CEO of small fashion label Popflex is used to scammers creating knockoffs of her designs. But then one used AI to swap her face for someone else’s in a counterfeit marketing video. In a TikTok published earlier this month, Cassey Ho said Begoing swapped her face in a video where she is seen modeling her own clothes.
Cassey Ho As the owner of the activewear fashion label Popflex, Cassey Ho has dealt with counterfeit ripoffs of her designs in the past, a common scourge of the fashion industry. But earlier this month, Ho encountered something she’d never seen before: a no-name brand on Amazon that was not only selling a knockoff version of her skort, but using her own video modeling the item — with her face swapped out for someone else’s. “It feels incredibly violating,” she told Forbes .
“I’m going through this listing and that’s my body, but that’s not my face. You feel like you’ve been robbed and taken advantage of.” Counterfeiting is nearly as old a problem as fashion itself, but some argue that new advances in AI are making the problem worse than ever.
Everything from high-end labels to celebrity sports jerseys have been consistently copied for decades, only recently to be accelerated in the age of mainstream e-commerce and AI. Some allege that Chinese fashion firms are predicated entirely on IP theft; one lawsuit against fast fashion powerhouse Shein argued that it has become “the world’s top clothier through the deft use of artificial intel.
