DgcityChinese regulators have opened a new front against artificial intelligence: the digital clones that borrow a famous face, copy a familiar voice, and sell products to people who believe the endorsement is real. The country’s top internet authority said it had removed more than 47,000 pieces of harmful content and penalized 3,961 accounts for misleading the public.
The figures, released by the Cyberspace Administration of China, came with a direct demand that platforms do more to police synthetic media on their sites. The misuse follows a familiar pattern. A face-swapped video or a cloned voice presents a celebrity praising a serum, a supplement or an investment product. Fans trust the face in front of them, and the accounts behind the content collect followers, sales and advertising revenue.
Actress Wu Yue brought the problem into the open last month when she published a video saying someone had used artificial intelligence to fake her face and clone her voice to promote a facial essence. She asked how much money had been taken from consumers and demanded it be returned. The account was banned that day. Scholar Yi Zhongtian also pushed back against generated videos that falsely claimed he had Alzheimer’s disease.
The accounts publicly singled out by regulators did more than run fake ads. Some fabricated celebrity health rumors, invented personal stories, or posted emotional content designed to harvest followers. Others used artificial intelligence to produce inappropriate images of stars, then monetized the attention through marketing deals.
A second, two-month campaign will take aim at health misinformation, a category where the technology has proved especially profitable. Regulators flagged the mass production of near-identical articles and videos that manufacture fake trends around supplements and medical advice, often by swapping an expert’s face or cloning a voice for livestream selling.
The crackdown lands as generative tools make impersonation cheaper and harder to spot. For Chinese audiences, the Wu Yue case drove home an uncomfortable point: even a convincing video, in a familiar voice, may be no more than an advertisement wearing a stolen identity. Platforms now face the harder task of catching those fakes before the money changes hands.
