Kalshi's AI ad turned a creator's video into a white man

Elliot Choy was scrolling when he found his own apartment in an advertisement for Kalshi. The video showed a man unpacking a computer and books in a New York apartment, shot and lit exactly like a video Choy had posted. The man was white. Choy is not.

"i guess kalshi saw this and thought they should steal my video, turn me into a white dude, and run it as an ad," he wrote on X on September 23, 2026, with stills from the ad stacked above his own frames.

Kalshi does not deny it. A spokesperson told Business Insider that the ad is about four months old and was made by an agency that supplied the video. The spokesperson said the company no longer uses AI-generated content that depicts people, and that it is reviewing its relationship with the agency. Kalshi declined to identify the agency.

NPR correspondent Bobby Allyn reported that the ad is real and that Kalshi called it old, adding that the company says it no longer uses AI-generated ads. Protos noted that the spot was promoted on YouTube this week nonetheless.

The mechanics matter more than the insult. Someone took a creator's published footage, ran it through a generative model, kept the set, the camera move and the framing, and replaced the person. Kalshi says an agency did that, which is the ordinary arrangement in advertising: the brand buys the result and the agency carries the method. When the method is a model trained on other people's video, the brand's paperwork and the person in that video are not in the same room.

Choy is not the first creator to say Kalshi used his work. Business Insider reported that Pushpek Sidhu, a Toronto creator who posts about food and sports, wrote in June 2026 that a person identifying himself as a Kalshi representative approached him about a collaboration and then stopped replying. Sidhu told Business Insider he later saw his own material in Kalshi advertising.

A second Kalshi spot drew its own pile-on. Made in a Pixar-like animation style, it follows a couple in financial trouble, runs on the suspicion that one partner is cheating, and ends with the reveal that she has been trading egg prices on Kalshi. Users called it cringe, out of touch and an advertisement for gambling addiction.

Creators have been on this end of the pipeline all year. SLOP TV covered a pin trading app that blamed Meta's Advantage+ system for an AI-altered ad featuring a Disney creator, and Instagram's AI labels slowing creators down by flagging their real footage as synthetic. Both stories ended where this one starts: the tool is cheap, the audit trail is not, and the person in the original video finds out last.

Kalshi is a prediction market that has grown by letting users trade on everything from elections to reality television winners, and it is separately fighting lawsuits from state regulators who argue it runs an unlicensed gambling operation, a claim Kalshi denies.

You cannot opt out of a scraping pipeline you were never told about, so the practical defence is still the boring one: license your footage in writing, tag your own uploads with provenance metadata where the platform supports it, and screenshot everything.