‘Josh’ was an AI avatar covertly marketing on TikTok for a company that works with recruiting firms. Some of the videos were racially charged. CBC’s Visual Investigations team tracked down his creators to get some answers.

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A viral TikTok account featuring 'Josh', an AI-generated avatar, was used by the recruiting platform Nexa to covertly market its services. The videos, which depicted Josh struggling to find employment and included racially charged content, were not clearly labeled as AI-generated, leading viewers to believe Josh was a real person.

CBC's Visual Investigations team traced the account to Nexa and questioned its CEO about the campaign. While Nexa claimed to be transparent about the use of AI, TikTok determined the videos did not meet its disclosure policies and removed the account. The campaign has raised concerns among experts about the use of AI personas in marketing, particularly when the content is not clearly identified as artificial.

That white guy who can't get a job at Tim Hortons? He’s AI

This is Josh. Tim Hortons just asked if I speak Punjabi. I'm whiter than their Boston cream. He's not a real person. He's AI. I just applied to Staples for the fourth time. Looking into who's behind these videos, we discover that Josh is not just a realistic avatar going on a job hunt. Like, how do I get volunteer experience to get volunteer experience? Josh was created by an online hiring and recruiting platform. I'll be honest, we did that for fun. You know, some of the videos went extremely viral. So this certainly does take marketing to a whole new level, but not in a good way. Half a million unemployed. Working with the CBC's visual investigations team, we take a deep dive into this fake Fluencer account. It features a few characters, most prominently Josh. They stand out to us because on the surface, many of these videos are convincing. And they're not labelled as being AI generated on TikTok. Some are so convincing that viewers comment as if Josh is a real person, arguing with him and giving him advice on his job hunt. Other comments call the videos racist, which Josh says isn't his intention. For a company to use this kind of campaign tonality in order to attract consumers to its services is highly, highly problematic. And unlike anything that I've ever seen. I can't believe I lost the job to someone who barely speaks English. Apparently I'm not qualified to be a junior data analyst. Manager said they're fully staffed. The thing is, these weren't obvious advertisements. The brand name Nexa and logo pops up in the videos and comments again and again and again. Then we noticed the account's first follower is this person. And on the company's website, we see he's the co-founder and CTO. Nexa's CEO is Diffie Nair. We asked him about the account. Unemployed flex? Yeah, so that was actually a persona. We have our own TikTok account for Nexa, but this one was more so, let's go into the job seeker's mind. He also tells me about his company, which uses AI to match job seekers with open positions. Some of the comments on your videos say they're racially charged. Was that a concern for you? Like I can't stop people from saying that, but I tried to make videos kind of countering that. So I wanted to educate people using, you know, satire and comedies. There's obviously all these fun things going around how like, you know, it means they're taking over the job market and we want to have fun with it. But when we show experts. This type of content is typically associated with like far-right groups. For this type of narrative and language to be used or storytelling and sentiment to be used by a commercial player is problematic on a number of different levels. They're only eight seconds long, they're quick to watch, very convincing because they're AI. But what it doesn't label, it doesn't say it's AI, which is deceiving. But Nair disagrees. Usually it's auto-tagged. And usually I'm very upfront about it. When it comes to disclosing it, of course we are. But when we reach out to TikTok about the account Unemployed Flex, they tell us the videos were not properly labeled as AI. This is what it's supposed to look like. Nexus videos do have a small VO watermark. That's Google's AI video generator. But TikTok says it didn't meet their policy. The account was then taken down. We reached out to Nair and he tells us he's appealed the removal. Have you seen any questionable AI marketing online? Email to alls at cbc.ca.

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That white guy who can't get a job at Tim Hortons? He’s AI

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