Stirling Marathon fields calls for a washer an AI video invented

An AI-generated video invented a washing machine, drew more than 100,000 views on YouTube, and sent real customers calling a company that does not make one.

Stirling Marathon, a family-owned appliance maker in Elora, Ontario, has spent the days since fielding inquiries about a product it does not sell, CTV News reported on November 9. The company sells no products in the United States.

The video was posted to a YouTube account six days before the CTV report. It uses some of Stirling Marathon's real product imagery and marketing materials alongside AI-generated content, and it claims a washing machine made by the company will sell out across the United States. Similar videos have since appeared on other accounts. Stirling Marathon did not authorize the video and does not know who made it, CTV News reported.

"We don't actually make that model," Jordan Cuddihy, a Stirling Marathon bilingual customer service representative, told CTV News. Cuddihy said a quick Google search turned up the video, which described a fictitious washing machine called the "keel." Within a couple of days, Cuddihy said, the company had inquiries from across North America, including Alaska, Nebraska and Delaware, from people asking where to find a machine that does not exist.

Watch CTV News's report below.

What is Stirling Marathon?

Stirling Marathon has made appliances in Elora for about a decade and describes itself as proudly Canadian and family-owned. Its catalog is refrigerators, freezers, ranges and wine and beverage coolers, and the company sells them only in Canada. It also sells one imported washing machine, which it is discontinuing and which is not the model in the AI video. It says it is one of the only companies in Canada that manufactures refrigerators.

The fake video, according to the Waterloo Region Record, used the company's own corporate footage. "They've taken our corporate video that we had produced a few years ago. My face is visible in multiple different shots in this 17-minute video," vice-president Phil Greenway told the Record. The video promotes a fake brand, Marathon Keel, which is not a company brand.

That blend of real and generated material is what makes the video hard to wave off. Greenway described it as "a mismatch of a bunch of different photos and video clips" that an AI bot or a person built from material scraped off the internet. "It presents the fictional washing machine so convincingly that consumers believe it's a legitimate product," he said. The Record reported the videos had been viewed more than 130,000 times in four days, and that the calls the company is taking skew to older people. The video also advertises a $20 e-book in its description.

Kami Vaniea, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, told CTV News the likeliest motive is money. "The easiest answer is just clickbait, because if you can get enough views, you can get people to associate with your account, then you can make money off of YouTube," she said. A second possibility, she added, is that the account is being built up to push something else later. She called the video "the definition of AI slop."

Stirling Marathon is trying to get it taken down. The Record reported the company has flagged the video to YouTube and Facebook but has not heard back, and that YouTube has applied an AI caution label to some versions. Vaniea said viewers can report the videos as misinformation, but that cheap AI video tools mean this kind of fake will keep appearing.

Stirling Marathon's real catalog, which lists refrigerators, freezers, ranges and wine coolers and no washing machine, is at stirlingmarathon.com.