Kalshi ran a creator's video as an ad after an AI face swap

Prediction-market company Kalshi ran a video ad built from a creator's own footage with a different man's face in his place, and the creator only found out when YouTube served it to him.

Elliott Choy, a tech YouTuber, posted side-by-side stills of the ad and the video he published in September 2025 about moving into his New York apartment. The room, the desk, the books and the framing matched. His face did not, and Choy's description of the swap was blunt: Kalshi took his video and turned him into "a white dude" who does not exist. NPR correspondent Bobby Allyn confirmed that the ad was real, according to Futurism.

Kalshi's answer, given to Business Insider, is that the ad was about four months old, that an agency supplied the video, and that the company no longer uses AI-generated content that depicts people while it reviews its relationship with that agency. The company declined to name the agency, and has not said how many creators' videos the same campaign reused.

Choy was not the first. Pushpek Sidhu, a 29-year-old food and sports creator in Toronto, told Business Insider that someone identifying himself as a Kalshi representative approached him about a collaboration, then went quiet, and that he later saw a Kalshi ad in Houston that followed his own video's script and gestures almost shot for shot, with a different man delivering them. "They could easily pay me a little bit," Sidhu said.

The mechanics are cheap and ordinary. Zohaib Ahmed, chief executive of the deepfake-tracking company Resemble AI, told Business Insider that a spot like the one Choy flagged could start with a thumbnail pulled from a social video and a face swapped in on top. His company's sweep of Meta's ad library across industries found that about 9 per cent of ads in recent months contained generative AI. "It's difficult to draw the line of where you've crossed legally," Ahmed said. "However, there's a pretty solid ethical line."

The advertising trade's own position is that the line was crossed. Mick Feldman, director of client services at influencer marketing agency The Now, told Business Insider that swapping one creator's face for another without consent is "completely unethical", and that the standard route is to license the footage. He put the difference plainly: shooting a new video with a creator can cost tens of thousands of dollars, while licensing a video the creator already made usually costs about a quarter of that. Some creators now license their likeness for AI ads on purpose.

Kalshi has been here before. It ran an AI-generated ad for the 2025 NBA Finals that it said cost $2,000 to make, and its head of growth, Keaton Inglis, told Ad Age earlier in September that he had moved the company away from AI-generated work to be "as human as possible going forward".

For creators, the practical defence is not a better contract but cheap evidence: keep your originals, and if a brand's ad looks like your footage, the side-by-side is the whole case.